virginia woolf
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Perhaps the Greatest Pleasure
It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great…
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Steve Stern
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Steve Stern about his new novel The Pinch, about what it means for Jews to be “people of the book,” and how fiction and history can be entwined in entertaining and challenging ways.
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My Evenings Reading Alone
For nearly ten years I had lain beside him: the snoring was a blow, but, looking back, it was also a necessary portent, an etch in our story, the fuzzy spot on a picture frame you can’t tell is from…
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The Highest Bidder
Valeria Luiselli previews The Story of My Teeth for BOMB Magazine; among the dentures being optioned are G.K. Chesterton’s, Virginia Woolf’s, Charles Lamb’s, Rousseau’s, and the fangs of Mr. Montaigne.
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
For National Poetry Month Days 25 & 26, Christian Anton Gerard and Ada Limon provide us with poems of love and luck. Then, Sean Donovan has good things to say in his Saturday Review of the film It Follows, a “clever”…
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Creativity and Mental Illness
Though I did not know it then, Adeline was not just a work of fiction, or an act of literary ventriloquism. It was my suicide note. Had I succeeded in taking my life, this would have been clear. At Lit…
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The Best Year in Literature
Hemingway’s In Our Time, Fitzgerald’s the Great Gatsby, and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway were all published in 1925, the year that the BBC’s Culture site has declared the “greatest year for books ever.” The Guardian wonders, though, what other years could…
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Weird, Wonderful Woolf
Emma Woolf (yes, a relation) writes about the personal life of Virginia Woolf: There has been much speculation about the sexual dimension of the Woolfs’ relationship: was the marriage ever consummated, was she frigid, was she a lesbian? In 1967…
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“And She Went on Her Way Rejoicing”
Muriel Spark and the perennial question: “Am I a woman or an intellectual monster?”
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Back to the Future
The past is always a story, impossible to remember without molding it into a narrative that privileges some details over others and colors memory with tone. Reflecting on a recent trend toward biographical fiction, Joanna Scutts warns us about the…
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What’s New?
For the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks writes about why we should read new books, when there’s so many “classics…available at knockdown prices”: As a reviewer of books she would often pan, Virginia Woolf thought one of the…