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New York Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Book Club: Read ‘Mrs. Dalloway,' by Virginia Woolf, with the Book Review
Welcome to the Book Review Book Club! Every month, we select a book to discuss with our readers. Last month, we read 'The Safekeep,' by Yael van der Wouden. (You can also go back and listen to our episodes on 'Playworld,' 'We Do Not Part' and 'Orbital.') It's a beloved opening line from a beloved book: 'Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.' So begins Virginia Woolf's classic 1925 novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway.' The book tracks one day in the life of an English woman, Clarissa Dalloway, living in post-World War I London, as she prepares for, and then hosts, a party. That's pretty much it, as far as the plot goes. But within that single day, whole worlds unfold, as Woolf captures the expansiveness of human experience through Clarissa's roving thoughts. Over the course of just a few hours, we see her grapple with social pressures, love, family, the trauma of war and more. The result is a groundbreaking portrayal of consciousness and a poetic look at what it means to be alive. This year, the novel turns 100 years old. To celebrate the book's centennial, in June, the Book Review Book Club will read and discuss 'Mrs. Dalloway,' by Virginia Woolf. We'll be chatting about the book on the Book Review podcast that airs on June 27, and we'd love for you to join the conversation. Share your thoughts about the novel in the comments section of this article by June 19, and we may mention your observations in the episode. Here's some related reading to get you started. Our original 1925 review of 'Mrs. Dalloway': 'Mrs. Woolf is eminently among those who 'kindle and illuminate.' Mrs. Woolf has set free a new clarity of thought and rendered possible a more precise and more evocative agglutination of complicated ideas in simplicity of expression.' Read the full review here. This essay by the author Michael Cunningham (whose book 'The Hours' is a riff on 'Mrs. Dalloway') about Virginia Woolf's literary revolution: 'Woolf was among the first writers to understand that there are no insignificant lives, only inadequate ways of looking at them. In 'Mrs. Dalloway,' Woolf insists that a single, outwardly ordinary day in the life of a woman named Clarissa Dalloway, an outwardly rather ordinary person, contains just about everything one needs to know about human life, in more or less the way nearly every cell contains the entirety of an organism's DNA.' Read the full essay here. The writer Ben Libman's essay, 'Was 1925 Literary Modernism's Most Important Year?', in which he discusses Virginia Woolf and a host of other modernist writers: 'She is an inhabitant of minds. And the mind, in 'Mrs. Dalloway' and later, in a more extreme sense, in 'The Waves' (1931), is a kind of nebulous antenna tuning in and out of life's frequencies, ever enveloped in its luminous halo.' Read the full essay here. We can't wait to discuss the book with you. In the meantime, happy reading!
New York Times
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
21 Nonfiction Books Coming this Summer
The Dry Season After the breakup of a disastrous relationship, Febos takes a vow of celibacy — not to get closer to God, but to get closer to herself. She relishes in the sensuality of solitude and the pursuit of her art, a practice she situates in a long lineage of women who have made similar trade-offs: the Benedictine abbess Hildegard von Bingen and the authors Virginia Woolf and Octavia Butler, to name a few. Buckley Tanenhaus, a former editor of the Times Book Review, exposes the roots of the modern conservative movement through this authoritative biography of William F. Buckley Jr., the firebrand writer and commentator who shaped it. As Buckley's only authorized biographer, Tanenhaus draws from troves of his private papers and extensive interviews with the man himself. The Gunfighters In his follow-up to the best selling 'Forget the Alamo,' Burrough offers a myth-busting look at the Wild West, though still replete with outlaws, cattle drives and carnage. In Burrough's telling, the Lone Star State, at the crossroads of anarchic frontier culture and Old South dueling culture, has been a hotbed of violence since its inception, making it a haven for gunslingers and, more formatively, the newspapermen and Hollywood producers who wanted to dramatize them. How to Lose Your Mother 'I was born to privilege, born on third base, but desperate to strike out and go home,' writes Jong-Fast of her childhood in the shadow of her fame-hungry feminist icon mother, the writer Erica Jong. As Jong's health declines, Jong-Fast — now an esteemed writer in her own right — offers an unflinching, albeit not unkind, reflection on the relationship between mothers and daughters. Baddest Man A veteran sports journalist's nuanced history of the heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson offers a portrait of a mercurial young street fighter from Brooklyn, thrust onto the world stage — with all its attendant perks and indignities. Though the narrative ends in 1988, at the height of Tyson's boxing career, it sets in motion 'the snowballing phenomenon' of one of the most controversial athletes in American history. Murderland Fraser begins with a simple true-crime curiosity — why did the Pacific Northwest have so many serial killers in the '70s and '80s? — and expands her gaze to encompass the recent history of American industrialization and the hidden consequences of environmental degradation. The result is a scientific re-examination of Ted Bundy and his ilk, and the toxic chemicals that may have rotted their brains. The Möbius Book Split into fiction and memoir — two narratives, each beginning at either cover — Lacey's latest book draws its cohesion from ruminations on religion, permanence and waning relationships. In a novella, two friends, Marie and Edie, discuss a mutual friendship over tequila as a fresh puddle of blood collects outside a neighbor's door. Elsewhere, Lacey processes the aftermath of a breakup and the possibility of new love via reflections on Annie Baker, Dr. Watson and Christianity. 'Make It Ours' This biography of Virgil Abloh, the men's wear chief at Louis Vuitton until his death in 2021, doubles as a lens into a staid luxury industry undergoing rapid transformation. Givhan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, deftly lays out how streetwear's grass roots revolution challenged fashion's stuffy notions of taste, exclusivity and their consumers — and paved the way for a hip-hop provocateur like Abloh to rise to the top. The Beast in the Clouds In 1928-29, Theodore Roosevelt's two eldest sons went on a swashbuckling global adventure to prove the existence of the until-then mystical panda bear. Holt chronicles their journey into the Himalayan wilderness — marred by sickness, violence and extreme weather — and what the landmark mission meant for the future of wildlife conservation. A Marriage at Sea In the early '70s, an eccentric married couple ditched their landlocked lives for grand plans to sail to New Zealand. Elmhirst's book opens just as a sperm whale crashes into their boat, kicking off a harrowing 117 days stranded at sea. But while the physical circumstances are extraordinary, the psychological drama is all too universal. 'What else is a marriage,' asks Elmhirst, 'if not being stuck on a small raft with someone and trying to survive?' On Her Game Caitlin Clark, the highest-scoring college basketball player in N.C.A.A. history, was a revelation to most observers following her standout season in 2024. Brennan draws on interviews and behind-the-scenes reporting in this energetic account of that campaign, and explains how the ensuing explosion in popularity of women's basketball is a legacy of Title IX's passage in 1972. Dinner with King Tut In the budding discipline known as experimental archaeology, researchers are driven by the full spectrum of human senses. Kean follows them on zany investigations and tactile recreations of ancient life that involve hunting with primitive spears, baking with ancient yeast strains, wrapping human mummies, taking perilous boats out to sea and building Roman-style roads. Sloppy, Or: Doing It All Wrong King's first book, 'Tacky,' was a sharp and spirited essay collection on pop culture and the pleasures of 'bad' taste (think: Creed, the Cheesecake Factory and 'Jersey Shore')8 This follow-up, which also enumerates 'my mistakes and crimes,' as the author has put it, is constructed out of 17 observant essays on the compulsions and vices — overspending, shoplifting, addiction, to name a few — that have molded her. Tonight in Jungleland Carlin, who has published biographies of R.E.M., Paul Simon and the Boss himself, pulls back the curtain on the making of Springsteen's 'Born to Run' album 50 years after its release. Drawing on interviews with the artist and his inner circle, Carlin revisits how each song was written and recorded while shedding light on the arduous studio sessions and their parallels to Springsteen's career. Blessings and Disasters Braiding personal narrative with Southern history, Okeowo, a contributing writer at The New Yorker, reckons with her love for Montgomery, Alabama, where she was raised by Nigerian parents, despite the state's legacy of chattel slavery and Indigenous dispossession and its more recent evolution into the backdrop for Amazon warehouses, auto plants and culture war lawsuits. King of Kings Much like his 'Lawrence in Arabia' (2013), Anderson's latest is an exercise in demystification. This absorbing account of the 1979 Iranian revolution unravels the story of how the nation's seemingly invulnerable leader, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, was forced into exile, and the ensuing hostage crisis that rattled American confidence and singed its reputation in the Middle East. Tart After quitting a 9-to-5 in corporate marketing, Cheff, the anonymous author of this gritty memoir, breaks into London's fine dining world in the hopes of becoming a chef. What follows is a tell-all detailing hot bartenders, endless emulsions and grueling work weeks offset by plenty of sex. Summer of Our Discontent Williams, a dependably contrarian voice on issues of race and social justice in the United States, examines how a confluence of issues — the Covid-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, the proliferation of social media — sparked an 'illiberal backlash,' and traces its influence to ongoing social justice movements, such as pro-Palestine encampments at universities across the country. Hotshot Wildland firefighting is no joke, as Selby, who spent years as part of an elite unit known as the Hotshots, details in this memoir. The author details their teenage struggles with homelessness and addiction, notes the rugged camaraderie and sexism of fire crews and shares searing insights on federal fire policy, Indigenous land use and American ecological history. Anonymous Male A former F.B.I. sniper falls off the grid in Somalia, raises a private army in Southeast Asia, survives a coup d'état and lives clandestinely for years until a near-death experience forces him to reassess his life. What sounds like the melodramatic plot of a James Patterson novel is Whitcomb's lived past, candidly divulged in this redemptive memoir. The Martians Mars, our barren neighbor, has served as an empty canvas for our expansionist imaginations since long before Elon Musk arrived on the scene. Baron chronicles the lasting influence of the Mars mania that gripped America during the early 1900s, how it captured the imaginations of Nikola Tesla and Alexander Graham Bell, generated speculative news headlines, fueled astronomical ambitions and left an indelible imprint on our culture.
Telegraph
19-05-2025
- General
- Telegraph
Why the semicolon could die out
It is a piece of punctuation that has divided writers and authors for centuries. Novelists including Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen have not shied away from using them, but that has not stopped critics branding writers who use them 'an embarrassment to their families and friends'. Now the semicolon could be dying out, according to research. Although once a central part of punctuation, usage of the semi-colon has almost halved over the past 20 years following Tony Blair's New Labour heyday, according to the makers of language-learning app Babbel. Young people who do not know how to use semicolons are behind the decline, the research suggests. Babbel used Google Ngram, a specialised version of the search engine that searches five million English-language books, to look up how often semicolons had appeared in British English between the year 2000 and 2022. They were used after one in every 205 words in 2000 but now follow just one in every 390 words, a decline of 47 per cent since the millennium. More than half (54 per cent) of young Britons surveyed by the app company do not know the rules around correct usage of semicolons, while 28 per cent simply do not use the mark at all in their writing. Sofia Zambelli, a spokesman for the app company, said: 'Our findings reveal that the semicolon is an 'endangered' punctuation mark; abandoned by many British writers who might have been expected to showcase its value, and often misunderstood by younger generations. 'Our data shows that Gen Z is not rejecting the semicolon; rather, they fear using it incorrectly. 'The semicolon, in particular, presents a challenge for many English learners. Whilst searching for best-use cases to illustrate the practicality and beauty of the semicolon, we found many historical texts but fewer contemporary examples.' The year 1781 was found to be the peak of its deployment, Babbel claimed, with one of the marks to be found, on average, every 90 words in continuous prose. Ben Jonson, the 16th-century English poet and contemporary of Shakespeare, described the semicolon as a 'somewhat longer breath' designed to introduce a pause into a sentence, bridging the gap between a full stop and the shorter interval introduced by the comma. Modern grammatical rules dictate that the semicolon is used to conjoin two separate clauses into a single sentence without the use of a conjunction. A famous example from English literature comes from the opening line of Charles Dickens' 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities: 'It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.' The versatile mark can also be used to lay out a list in prose without resorting to bulleted or numbered points. The University of Sussex gives three firm rules for the semicolon's usage in other scenarios: 'The two sentences are felt to be too closely related to be separated by a full stop; there is no connecting word which would require a comma, such as and or but; the special conditions requiring a colon are absent.' Italian humanists are believed to be the inventors of the semicolon, with a Venetian treatise about Mount Etna published in the year 1494 being its first appearance in writing according to Paris Review magazine. 'It was born into a time period of writerly experimentation and invention, a time when there were no punctuation rules, and readers created and discarded novel punctuation marks regularly,' Cecelia Watson wrote in the periodical, giving a précis of her 2019 book which she simply titled Semicolon. Illustrating the punctuation mark's usage in a review of Ms Watson's tome, the New Yorker magazine's Mary Norris added in the same year: 'I don't hate semicolons; I hate writing about semicolons.'
Indian Express
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
What writers think of Virginia Woolf's ‘Mrs Dalloway', a century later
Do men read women? Or, more precisely, do books written by women about the lives of ordinary women count as 'literature'? In the century since the publication of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, about the life of an upper-crust London woman going about her day, much has changed in how literature now mainstreams what was once niche, suggesting that the domestic, the ordinary, is anything but trivial. This shift in perspective is powerfully echoed in Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 novel, The Hours, where Woolf's legacy ripples through the lives of women across generations, revealing how deeply her questions still resonate. Woolf herself wondered whether a novel could be built from the ebb and flow of a single day, from flowers bought, parties planned, thoughts half-spoken. That it could — and did — is why Mrs Dalloway remains a classic. Its enduring relevance lies in how it dignifies the internal lives of women, revealing depth in what society once dismissed as minutiae. A century later, writers, poets and academics speak of the quiet, radical power of Mrs Dalloway — and how it touched their lives: 'To teach Mrs Dalloway, as I did to third-year English Honours students, is to delve into the very bones and sinews of the book. What makes it so brilliant, for all its seeming simplicity, is what we looked at in the classroom, and the more you looked at it, the more depths were revealed. To knit together London, the war, the trenches, issues of sanity and madness, youthful homo-erotic love, the ecstasy and pain of living, all filtered through the mind of one woman, required a skill that one can only marvel at. Thank you, Virginia Woolf, for being a trailblazer for so many women writers after you.' -Manju Kapur, writer 'Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, like James Joyce's Ulysses, is set in one day. But within that time frame, Woolf plays around with time using flashbacks and memories. The novel fuses history and autobiography, haunted as it is by war, trauma, insanity, unrequited love, suppressed sexuality and death. In that dark world, emerging from the shadow of 'complete annihilation'', Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party – the kind of party that Woolf and her friends of the Bloomsbury Group must have hosted. In A Room of One's Own, she wrote about the need to retrieve the lives of women who had lived 'infinitely obscure lives'' but her own life and her friends' lives were far away from that world – 'they lived in squares and loved in triangles'. There is, in this novel, above everything else, Woolf's style – loitering, insidious and sensuous. It is one of the earliest examples of stream of consciousness writing in the English language in the 20th century and carried the influence of Marcel Proust, whose writings Woolf had read with great attention. Woolf, in her time, was unique. The last line of Mrs Dalloway could very well apply to her, 'For there she was''. -Rudrangshu Mukherjee, chancellor and professor of History, Ashoka University ''Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself '. I remember the opening line from the time my younger self first read the book – published a hundred years ago now. Considered Virginia Woolf's finest novel, it follows a day in the life of Mrs Dalloway, a London society matron, as she prepares for a party. The narrative is intercepted with other stories, interrogating themes of memory, remembrance, the aftermath of war, and a changing social order. The uniquely crafted novel gave a feminine lilt to form, style and the texture of language. Woolf's voice continues to remain immediate and spontaneous and to resonate with successive generations of readers.'' -Namita Gokhale, writer 'The novel first hit me like a storm. It was around 2006. It was Bachelor's third year, if I remember correctly, and an excellent teacher, Brinda Bose, taught us the text. She was a bit of an institution in Delhi University those days, and the way the novel came alive in her teaching was exceptional. That any prose could do such wave-like motions, I did not know. That writing could bide and expand, and hurry and shorten time, I did not know. That one's thoughts could be the subject of endless unravelling, I did not know. Woolf's prose, then, in Mrs Dalloway became a point of no return. Thereon, any writing one did, was an open-ended experiment, rather than a foreclosed set of possibilities. The novel taught me that prose could go to any place of your imagining.' -Akhil Katyal, poet 'For a hundred years now, people have wondered why Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Over the last 30 years, since I first read Woolf's novel, the emphasis in the opening sentence has kept shifting for me: from 'herself', when I was a university student, to 'buy' a few years later, and then to 'flowers' for a long time. In the changing history of these emphases was not only a record of my own proclivities, but a history of humanistic attention, aesthetic and political – on and of the woman, the 'herself'; an evolving lineage of consumption, that everything could be bought ('buy'); to 'flowers', the most ignored noun in the sentence and, by extension, the planet. Much older now, I see the invisible verb in that sentence that, I believe, gives us a history of modernism – walking, how it gives narrative energy and moodiness to the novel. A woman walking – in the city, in a novel, the sentences road and alley-like, not mimetically, but an experiment in rhythm.' -Sumana Roy, writer and poet 'For an artist, love is rarely enabling except in its non-fulfilment. So is sanity. Virginia Woolf wrestled with both all her life. One hundred years since its publication, Mrs Dalloway's fame has come to surpass its plotless plot and the sheer artistry of its techniques. This is a book which juxtaposes, both with caution and liberty, sanity and insanity (or, as she menacingly puts it, the 'odd whirr of wings in the head'), love and non-love, truth and untruth, life and death, an attempt which, puzzlingly or not I cant be certain, ends in the suicide of the 'mad' Septimus Smith and the survival of the 'sane' Clarissa Dalloway. If AN Whitehead's definition of the classic as 'patience in interpretation' is true, then Mrs Dalloway, just like its superior cousin, To the Lighthouse, will keep on yielding interpretations.' -Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari, writer 'I read A Room of One's Own in my first year of college. I was stunned by the prose – I had never encountered anything like it. I must have been equally entranced by the book's structure, its slow and sensuous unfolding of an argument that was so sharp and steely – a dazzling contrast only an inventor of a form could pull off – but I know that, at the time, I did not have the vocabulary to frame it this way, or to see its craft as a feminist reclamation of language itself. I didn't know that by including the personal in the telling, by showing us the maturing of the idea against the environment in which it gestated, Woolf was doing something radical. Not having this vocabulary, however, was not a bad thing. I remember, instead, being aware of a peculiar sensation under my tongue, a salty sweetness, as I read the book, a kind of muted crackling in the viscera, followed by a gentle give, all of which possibly meant the book was reconfiguring me from within. I hope the 18-year-olds in my classroom whom I introduce the text to are able to feel themselves rewritten through it too. The text is the only teacher they need.' -Devapriya Roy, writer
North Wales Chronicle
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- North Wales Chronicle
Garden design exhibition at V&A Dundee aims to inspire ‘joyful future'
Garden Futures: Designing With Nature will be on show at the design museum from Saturday until January 25. The exhibition explores the impact of garden design, including kitchen gardens and the popularity of allotments, as well as looking at artists such as William Morris. It includes a scent trail which features the fragrances of rose, jasmine and narcissus. More than 400 objects are on display in the exhibition, which 'digs up surprising stories of gardens through time, including creating sanctuaries and empowering communities and individuals to find peace and hope in times of adversity', according to curators. It explores international themes, including Persian garden paradises to the sustainable Oban Seaweed Gardens in Argyll and Bute, huge vertical gardens in Milan flourishing in giant concrete apartment blocks, and a garden in China inspired by video games. The exhibition also includes Dior menswear inspired by the garden at Charleston in Sussex which was a retreat in the early 20th century for the writers and creatives known as the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia Woolf, and was the home of painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Work by garden designer Piet Oudolf and Arabella Lennox-Boyd, who designed the landscape at Maggie's cancer centre in Dundee, is also on display. Leonie Bell, director of V&A Dundee, said: 'We are delighted to be opening Garden Futures: Designing With Nature as gardens and gardeners across Scotland are hitting their seasonal stride. 'Gardens are both everyday and extraordinary – they mean something different to everyone. These designed spaces reflect the times we live in and express our relationship with nature. Some are productive spaces for work, rest and play, while others represent profound spiritual, cultural and political ideas. 'This vibrant exhibition blooms with design stories of gardens from Scotland and around the world, unearthing different approaches to creating the 'perfect' garden. 'Garden Futures looks back to early earthly ideas of paradise and considers how gardening can cultivate a greener, fairer and more joyful future for humans and nature alike. 'Whether you're a seasoned gardener or you've never grown anything in your life, the exhibition offers a thought-provoking experience, providing moments of sanctuary and creative inspiration within its stunning design. 'We look forward to welcoming visitors who we hope will come away with a renewed sense of what a garden can mean, or a new-found curiosity about gardening and growing.'
