Open Letters Monthly - April 2009
April 2009
Before Nightfall
Just as we approach the time when there will be no more living witnesses to the Second World War, Richard Evans concludes his monumental three-volume Nazi history with The Third Reich at War. Steve Donoghue makes record of the results.
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A Deadly Serious Kind of Farce Rare indeed these days for mention of Iran to provoke smiles—and so Iraj Perezkzad’s beloved farce My Uncle Napoleon gains new relevance. Bryn Haworth takes a fresh look at an old friend. |
Cue Chaos
Oprah favorite Wally Lamb has co-opted the Columbine shootings, the Iraq war, and Hurricane Katrina for his latest bestseller, The Hour I First Believed. Julie McGinley directs a pointed look at his formula that makes tragedy equal growth.
| Planned Rampage Novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers have begun weaving the Columbine shootings into their fiction. Reviewing Dave Cullen’s Columbine, Brad Jones concentrates on the sad facts alone. |
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Message in a Klein Bottle
Celebrated young novelist Jesse Ball’s latest, The Way through Doors, twists and pulls at the nature of narrative itself. Lianne Habinek threads the labyrinth.
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So This Is What the Dream Is Like Notorious for its violence and misogyny, or misunderstood for its biting social commentary? Grand Theft Auto IV polarizes; video game docent Phillip A. Lobo attempts to broker a meeting. |
It’s a Mystery: “I’ve got a mind like a comic book” Bernie Gunther is back! In the newest incarnations of Philip Kerr’s crime series, the charismatic, cynical P.I.—more ready with a ribald wisecrack than a gun—has survived the decadent dog days of the Weimar Republic only to get down and dirty on the mean streets of Munich. Irma Heldman tags along after him. |
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Liminal
A poem by Christine Herzer
| The Flâneur Arthur Phillips’ new novel, The Song Is You, takes a sentimental bachelor’s soundtrack and sets it to adult themes of family tragedy. Sam Sacks listens to hear whether the opus reveals new growth in the novelist—and whether it will grow on the reader. |
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Con-Men
That persistent bugaboo of publishers (and recently, the reading public): writers passing off others’ work as their own. Paul Maliszewski’s Fakers looks at some notorious cases, and John G. Rodwan Jr. weighs in.
Rescue Pieces
Much critical buzz has accompanied Philipp Meyer’s debut novel American Rust (there’s talk of a Pulitzer)—Karen Vanuska cuts through the hype and attempts to nail down the thing itself.
| EMK For half a century, Senator Ted Kennedy has been carving out a legacy in Congress. The legacy and the man come into focus in Thomas J. Daly’s review of Last Lion. |
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Guide Virgil’s Aeneid has been attracting translators for centuries, and Sarah Ruden’s rendering is notable in more ways than one. (She calls him Vergil, for one thing, but that’s just the start.) Steve Donoghue regards her efforts in the latest “A Year with the Romans.” |
Amen to That
Anne Easter Smith’s The King’s Grace builds its plot around the mystery of the Princes in the Tower—and borrows its conceit from Josephine Tey’s classic A Daughter in Time. Finch Bronstein-Rasmussen examines the book and the mystery.
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Paddy Whacked Malcolm Gladwell is once again on the bestseller lists, this time for Outliers, about the social science of genius. Peter Coclanis begs to differ with the vox populi. |
“Stephanie,” this month’s main page photo, was taken by Jonas Sacks, a Dutch/American Cinematography student currently living in Los Angeles. Jonas likes to use available (or natural) light, and explores the boundaries of motion picture negative film through stills. His website is www.jonassacks.com
