At the New Yorker, Jenny Offill writes about the multitudes found within her favorite book, Virginia Woolf‘s Mrs. Dalloway. “In 1916, Virginia Woolf wrote about a peculiarity that runs through all real works of art,” Offill writes. “The books of certain writers (she was speaking of Charlotte Brontë at the time) seem to shape-shift with each reading. […] For me, Mrs. Dalloway is such a book, one to which I have mapped the twists and turns of my own autobiography over the years. Each time, I have found shocks of recognition on the page, but they are always new ones, never the ones I was remembering. Instead, some forgotten facet of the story comes to light, and the feeling is always that of having blurred past something that was right in front of me.”
Jenny Offill on the Shocks of Recognition in Mrs. Dalloway
Dating Woody
Diane Keaton writes in her upcoming memoir, Then Again, that “Going out with Woody Allen was like being in a Woody Allen movie.”
Alexandre Dumas in the Kitchen
Late American Novel Fans
Word is there have been sightings of the book I co-edited The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books in the wild, though it’s officially due in March. You can keep up on all the news about the book, including events and links to excerpts on the book’s new Facebook page.
Dead Ends
Recommended Reading: Enrique Vila-Matas on rock ‘n’ roll, anti-artists, and the central motor of his work.
Tuesday New Release Day
New releases this week: All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost by Lan Samantha Chang, “a writing-school success story” according to the New York Times in its review, Obama’s Wars, the latest book by legendary reporter Bob Woodward, Listen to This, a collection of essays published by music critic Alex Ross during his 12-year career at The New Yorker, and (almost new) is David Grossman’s To the End of the Land, as reviewed by Rayyan Al-Shawaf for The Millions.
The Poetry of Borders
Over at the Southern Humanities Review, Javier Zamora, Veronica Marquez, and others share their poems in a special feature for undocumented writers. Pair with Andrew Kay’s Millions essay on the power of poetry.