Novel Readings

Didn’t we only just do this? And yet here we are again, at the beginning of a new month with a brand new issue of Open Letters Monthly up and ready for your enlightenment and enjoyment! A few highlights:

Greg Waldmann reads Exceptional, by Dick and Liz Cheney, and finds it exceptionally (though unsurprisingly) bad.

Steve Donoghue reports on an outstanding history of the Battle of the Bulge, which (if Hitler had had his way) would have been a pivotal Nazi victory known as the Battle of Antwerp.

Victoria Olsen follows up her fascinating piece on Jane Avril from last month with a thoughtful essay on the pilgrimages we make to places like Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery.

My Dalhousie colleague Jerry White writes with his usual brio and a fair amount of annoyance about a new collection of essays from The New Republic.

And that’s not all: we’ve got JC Sutcliffe (known to bloggers as Slightly Bookist) on Timur Vermes’s risky comic novel Look Who’s Back; John Cotter looks at Jay Parini’s new biography of Gore Vidal; I take on Elizabeth Gilbert’s feel-good self-help book Big Magic; and even that’s not all! So do head on over to Open Letters Monthly and have a look, while the OLM team basks for a few days in pride and relief — and gratitude, also, for all the writers who contributed.