For the Paris Review, Lauren Groff takes a closer look at Virginia Woolf‘s second novel, Night and Day. Unlike her more popular novels, like To the Lighthouse and Orlando, this book has a noticeably different tone. “The conversation Virginia Woolf is conducting in her second novel is not the conversation of her later books,” Groff writes, “the one with avant-garde authors of the early twentieth century like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, but rather a shrewd and ultimately subversive discussion with the male writers of the Edwardian age, like Henry James, John Galsworthy, and her friend E. M. Forster. This is a book that gazes backward in time with skepticism and a virago’s impulse to shred into tatters all that it sees.”
Virginia Woolf Gazes Backward
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Recommended Reading: Millions contributor Shaj Mathew on avant-garde fiction.
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Edan, Meet Stephen
Our own Edan Lepucki’s whirlwind tour continues. Her debut novel California landed at number 3 on the Times Bestseller list and she celebrated with a visit to The Colbert Report. There was a bubble wrap drop. New Yorkers can see her tonight at WORD bookstore in Brooklyn and tomorrow at McNally Jackson in Manhattan. See Edan’s events page for the rest of her tour dates.
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Too Much to Process
A couple weeks ago, Brian Ted Jones reviewed The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell, which “takes place on the margins of a grand, cosmic struggle.” Not long afterwards, at The Rumpus, Woody Brown offered a somewhat negative take on the book, arguing that Mitchell makes it too difficult for the reader to suspend her disbelief. You could also read Brown’s Millions review of Haruki Murakami’s new novel.
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Research Bunker in NYC
The New York Public Library’s research collection will be moving to an impressive concrete bunker beneath Bryant Park (instead of the much protested option—New Jersey). Our own Michael Bourne writes about how the subway car, once a rolling library, is transitioning to digital.
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The Great Gatsby at 90
The Great Gatsby, that quintessential American classic, was first published 90 years ago today. Over at Scribner Magazine authors ranging from Anthony Doerr to Christopher Beha remember their first encounters with the novel, and Time has republished its original review of the novel.
Words & Symbols
Mairead Small Staid writes on the history and poetics of the ampersand, “a logogram masquerading as a letter, a letter that is also a word—like a and I and even o, but no—a letter that is only a word, the plainest word of all.”
Owning It
“What I want to argue is that we in contemporary English and literature departments need to think instead about how to keep doing abstraction, but better—how can we ‘own’ it, as my students might say, rather than wish it away.” Jeanne-Marie Jackson writes at 3:AM Magazine about comparative literature, the public, and politics.
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