Hesperus Press collected four long-neglected critical essays for their new collection, Virginia Woolf’s On Fiction. Her criticism, like her fiction, is an utter delight. …more

Helen Dunmore wrote the beautiful new introduction to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, published online by Granta, in conjunction with their latest, feminism-themed issue, The F-Word. The beginning of summer and the new intro are both reasons to revisit this classic.

“In To the Lighthouse Woolf has returned again and again to the destructive power of the male upon the creativity of the female… But Woolf seems to argue, at the end of the novel, that there is something beyond this agonizing fact of destruction, which is the saving androgyny of creation itself.”

I am, like you, a rabid reader of good books.

There are times, though, when I am not so feral. Reading is mostly a bust. Books fail. They fail to pinch my nerve. …more

In September 2008, David Foster Wallace stepped out onto his patio and did what most of us occasionally imagine doing, but hopefully never go through with. …more

These are Anton Chekhov’s last words, and the Guardian has a slideshow of some sometimes funny, sometimes chilling last words of quite a few literary figures.

(And while we’re talking about slideshows, I’d actually recommend the Jacket Copy write-up instead of the Guardian’s, because slideshows drive me freakin’ bonkers. Slideshows are for photography only, people. PHOTOGRAPHY!)

Among some other great ones:

“What’s that? Do I look strange?” — Robert Louis Stevenson

“I must go in. The fog is rising.” — Emily Dickinson

“I feel certain that I’m going mad again.” — Virginia Woolf

“For some days, of course, we hoped against hope that she had wandered crazily away and might be discovered in a barn or a village shop. But by now all hope is abandoned.”

An archive, made public for the first time, casts a revealing light on Virginia Woolf’s death, and includes a letter that “shows Clive Bell coming to terms with sister-in-law’s suicide.”

Someone bought Agatha Christie’s old “battered” trunk for a hundred quid at auction, and in it, she found some  jewels, most likely from the great mystery writer’s infamous collection. (via Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind)

Someone made a font out of Franz Kafka’s handwriting! The post is in German, but even if you don’t speak the language, it’s kinda cool to look at. (via Quarterly Conversation)

Got writer’s block? This list of “unusual firearms” should do the trick.

A look at romance novels from the perspective of evolutionary biology. (via Bookninja)

James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel talk with Rain Taxi about how we define science fiction. (via Mumpsimus)

And finally, a Cambodian reflection on Virginia Woolf.

It turns out Virginia Woolf was a big fan of science fiction.

Corpses doing it. Go on. Click. What could go wrong?

Its been said that the defining characteristic of us post-gen Xers is intense whimsy. That’s why I’m linking to these paper sculptures.

SFO to let you purchase carbon offsets for your flight right at the gate.

Nothing about this makes any sense to me: dental surgery key to restoring sight.

This week, the book blogs got technology, and it turns out they’re not so sure whether they like it. Below, see them wrestle with television invading their books, the Kindle, and crappy book trailers — also, Virginia Woolf uses one of those new voice recording contraptions.

Elizabeth Onusko at Guernica discusses the Kindle and E-textbooks and wonders “why our culture seems to value that which is new and novel without asking a few questions first.”

Virginia Woolf reads out loud.

On Galleycat, crappy trailers can hurt your book.

On Harriet the Blog, how will we study writers when they die if we don’t have their facebook passwords?

A social network for writers (via Silliman).

TV attacks books.

In other news, “A recovering evangelical’s hymnbook” with Carlene Bauer on Paper Cuts, parodies of literary masterpieces, and Slate doesn’t like Fahrenheit 451 going comic book.

The last book I loved was Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey. I hadn’t loved a book in a while, but I thought I might love this one because it is a Persephone book, and I also quite loved the cover which features a 1930s Harold Knight painting of a languid young lady in a sea-colored sweater and yellow skirt, reading on a window seat, with downs or cottages or some such British landscape murkily visible through the window beside her. …more

Cecil Woolf, 82, nephew of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, is the publisher of the Bloomsbury Heritage, a series of monographs that cover a wide variety of subjects concerning the members of the Bloomsbury Group. …more

On the heels of BEA comes the 2009 Woolf and the City conference, an event of modern proportion, which will be bringing fans of Virginia Woolf to the campus of Fordham University in New York from June 4-7. Keeping things ahead of the times, as Woolf would have wanted it, there will be Plenary Talks such as “Woolf’s Creative Violence,” “Cosmopolitan Woolf,” and “Stalking the Cyber-Woolf in a Digital Age.”  Special events include an evening with Princeton and the Stephen Pelton Dance Company, with an after party at the Hudson Hotel. Visit the site for a brief or full conference schedule and keep an eye out on The Rumpus for an upcoming review of the conference plus a Rumpus Interview with Cecil Woolf, the nephew of Leonard Woolf.

“Books ought to be so cheap that we can throw them away if we do not like them, or give them away if we do. Moreover, it is absurd to print every book as if it were fated to last a hundred years. The life of the average book is perhaps three months. Why not face this fact? Why not print the first edition on some perishable material which would crumble to a little heap of perfectly clean dust in about six months time? If a second edition were needed, this could be printed on good paper and well bound. Thus by far the greater number of books would die a natural death in three months or so. No space would be wasted and no dirt would be collected.” – Virginia Woolf in a debate with her husband Leonard, a publisher (from The Book Bench.) …more

by Rose Garrett

I recently read that revenge, in addition to sex and food, stimulates the pleasure centers of the brain, which explains why the settling of scores is often pursued with as much unbounded enthusiasm as philandering and doughnut holes. To that short list I would add book-reading, which might appear more high-minded than the rest, but which has revealed itself to me to be as base, vulgar, and fucking incredible as any of the seven sins. …more

Reading and Teaching Proust Was a Neuroscientist …more