Novel Readings

The August issue of Open Letters is up and full of the usual wide range of readerly goodies. I’m especially pleased to call attention to my Valve colleague Amardeep Singh’s “The Original Wasn’t Better,” which presents arguments against the literary purist’s “fixation on ‘fidelity'” in film adaptations. I admit, I count myself among those for whom Mira Nair’s revised ending to Vanity Fair was “a step too far,” but Amardeep helps me think about my resistance to it, and about the general issues involved in adaptation, in a more complicated way. The issue also includes a complete “fitt” of Adam Golaski’s new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Amelia Glaser on Peter Stein’s adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Demons, Megan Kearns on veganism and ‘carnism,’ Max Ross on Alberto Manguel’s A Reader on Reading, Steve Donoghue on a new biography of Edward II, Garrett Handley on the Shakespeare authorship controversy, Ingrid Norton on Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing–and that’s not all. Come on over and see for yourself!