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Open Letters Monthly Archive Feature: Novel Readings by Rohan Maitzen
Yes, Laura thought, it’s like a web. Whatever the secret, the real connections, we are inextricably woven into a huge web together, and detaching the threads, one by one, is hideously painful. As long as one still feels the tug, one is not ready to die.
Read MoreThe moment when the dashing, exceedingly well-dressed, but annoyingly remote Earl of Worth declares “The game is up!” is the moment I finally understood fully that the reason I hadn’t liked him much throughout the rest of the novel is that he’s both the romantic lead and a detective hero–part Regency rake and part Sherlock Holmes.
Read MoreIn both of my classes this week we are focusing on young women making mistakes. It’s interesting for me (and I hope also for the students who are in both classes) to compare the very different ways their novels approach their rather different errors. Both of them do wrong things for right reasons.
Read More“To understand the stories of the seven lost students who are the subjects of this book,” Tanya Talaga begins her devastating, angry, and thought-provoking book Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City, you must understand Thunder Bay’s past, how the seeds of division, of acrimony and distaste, of a lack of […]
Read MoreThe 2016 U. S. election has given some books I regularly teach new resonance–and not in a good way. In March 2016, Hard Times was indeed “for these times,” with Mr. Bounderby running for President: He was a rich man: banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not. A big, loud man, with a stare, and a metallic laugh. […]
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