Latest news with #Mrs.Dalloway
New York Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Book Club: Read ‘Wild Dark Shore,' by Charlotte McConaghy, 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 Catch,' by Yrsa Daley-Ward. (You can also go back and listen to our episodes on 'Mrs. Dalloway,' 'The Safekeep,' 'Playworld' and 'We Do Not Part.') Charlotte McConaghy's latest novel, 'Wild Dark Shore,' opens with an enigma: A mysterious, half-drowned woman washes ashore. The stranger's name is Rowan, and she has arrived on Shearwater, a remote island near Antarctica. The island, which houses an important seed bank, was once teeming with a community of scientists, but now the project is shutting down, the workers have left and the land lies quiet and deserted, everybody gone except for the Salt family. Composed of the patriarch, Dominic, and his children — moody Raff, animal-loving Fen and precocious Orly — the Salts remain as stewards of the island and are tasked with preparing the seed bank for its ultimate closure. Each is lost in his or her own way, and all are hiding terrible secrets. They're not alone. Rowan herself has come to the island with a hidden purpose, putting this small community on a crash course for a long-overdue reckoning. In August, the Book Review Book Club will read and discuss 'Wild Dark Shore,' by Charlotte McConaghy. We'll be chatting about the book on the Book Review podcast that airs on Aug. 22, and we'd love for you to join the conversation. Share your thoughts about the novel in the comments section of this article by Aug. 14, and we may mention your observations in the episode. Here's some related reading to get you started. Our review of 'Wild Dark Shore': 'In 'Wild Dark Shore,' we're shown why a person might withdraw from the messiness of life after tragedy and trauma. … The novel also offers its injured characters a path back to connection and community, a risk McConaghy argues must be worth taking, no matter how fraught the future, no matter how temporary the family.' Read the full review, by Matt Bell, here. The American Bookseller Association's interview with McConaghy about 'Wild Dark Shore': ''Wild Dark Shore' is about fear. Fear of how perilous the world grows, fear of the future we are facing, fear of the life we are leaving to our children, and how we are going to keep them safe. Ultimately, I think it's an exploration of how we love in the face of this fear, in the face of loss.' Read the full interview here. Our review of McConaghy's previous novel, 'Once There Were Wolves': 'This is a heartfelt and earnest novel — in every chapter, there's evidence of a writer straining for the cathedral cadence, that elegiac note of aching significance — but sincerity doesn't guarantee a satisfying read.' Read the full review, by Harriet Lane, here. Our review of McConaghy's debut adult novel, 'Migrations': 'This novel's prose soars with its transporting descriptions of the planet's landscapes and their dwindling inhabitants, and contains many wonderful meditations on our responsibilities to our earthly housemates.' Read the full review here. We can't wait to discuss the book with you. In the meantime, happy reading!
IOL News
02-07-2025
- General
- IOL News
Is the semi-colon semi-dead?
Too demure to be a colon but more assertive than a comma, the semicolon is a useful little tool. Mark Lasswell Like the fissionable atom, punctuation marks are wee items capable of causing a tremendous release of energy. Passionate disagreement over the use of exclamation points is so familiar that a 'Seinfeld' plotline saw Elaine's new romance with a writer blow up because he didn't share her enthusiasm. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in the anti-exclaim brigade, famously said using them is 'like laughing at your own joke.' Tell that to Tom Wo!fe. Or just about anyone who texts in this angry age, when the exclamation point signals 'I'm not fuming!' and a period can go off like a gunshot. Apostrophes? George Bernard Shaw loathed 'em, often leaving the 'uncouth bacilli' out of contractions, including didnt, wont and aint. Today, capricious apostrophe usage is so widespread (Its banana's out there!), and meets with such predictable fury, that one suspects a vast prank-the-English-teachers campaign. No piece of punctuation, though, stirs people up more than the humble semicolon. Too demure to be a colon but more assertive than a comma, the semicolon was introduced in 1494 by Venetian printer and publisher Aldus Manutius. What a useful little tool it has been in its primary role of inserting a graceful pause between two related independent clauses, as in: 'RFK Jr. came to my house; he tore out the medicine cabinet with a crowbar.' But now the semicolon is dead. Or semi-dead. Its use has collapsed, as underlined last month by a study from Babbel, an online language-learning platform. 'Semicolon usage in British English books has fallen by nearly 50% in the past two decades,' the survey said - and this sudden drop followed a steady decline across the past two centuries. A study of semicolon use in U.S. publishing from 1920 to 2019 saw a similarly dramatic slide. Newspapers, magazines, and fiction and nonfiction books all soured on the semicolon, though nonfiction after 2000 did see an uptick from the depths. The Babbel analysis touched off a gratifying round of articles in the British press contemplating the semicolon. The Independent: 'Our best punctuation mark is dying out; people need to learn how to use it'; the Financial Times: 'Semicolons bring the drama; that's why I love them'; the Spectator: 'The semicolon had its moment; that moment is over.' (A secondary function for semicolons is to divide up unwieldy lists; a tertiary function is to help headline writers amuse themselves.) On Team Semicolon, it turns out, we have Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and possibly Abraham Lincoln. ('I have a great respect for the semicolon; it's a very useful little chap' is a line attributed to Abe by a reminiscing journalist in 1878, which is to say: It sounds too good not to quote.) Virginia Woolf's novel 'Mrs. Dalloway,' the Guardian noted, employed 'more than 1,000 [semicolons] to echo its hero's flow of conscious thought.' On the Not a Fan side, the flow of conscious thought hating on the semicolon is considerable. 'Do not use semicolons,' Kurt Vonnegut advised in 2005. 'All they do is show you've been to college.' George Orwell: 'An unnecessary stop.' (Unnecessary but irresistible, apparently: He used plenty.) Cormac McCarthy: 'Idiocy.' Edgar Allan Poe wrote in an 1848 magazine article about being 'mortified and vexed' by printers who substituted semicolons for the dashes in manuscripts. But a couple of paragraphs above that complaint, Mr. Nevermore himself used one, writing, 'That punctuation is important all agree; but how few comprehend the extent of its importance!' Then again, maybe the printer just couldn't resist. Here's New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia delivering the keynote address at the 1935 U.S. Conference of Mayors: 'We have developed a new kind of officeholder: 'the semicolon boys.' The semicolon boys are simply a boil on the neck of this administration - the fellows, you know, who have an office and some law school has graduated them. … They sit down and look for semicolons. … If they would only stop the typewriters, we could get the steam shovels working.' When you have the Little Flower and Kurt Vonnegut, 70 years apart, agreeing that semicolon users are irritating, diploma-flaunting show-offs, what chance does the self-effacing little dot-over-comma have in these populist times? It's a miracle the Trump administration's threats to universities haven't included making federal support for infectious-disease research contingent on the immediate cessation of all semicolon use. But the semicolon will never completely go away, not as long as there are grown-ups around who still think punctuation emoticons are fun, using a ; and a ) to make a winking face and sending it to their teenage children, who are probably as mortified as Edgar Allan Poe. Maybe even vexed.
Express Tribune
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
A 100 years on, Mrs Dalloway continues to walk
On May 14, 1925, a London flower shop became the unlikely threshold to literary history. It was the day Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway was published, introducing readers to Clarissa Dalloway, a poised yet introspective woman preparing for an evening party. Over the course of a single day, Virginia captured a vast emotional landscape. A century on, the novel endures as a profound meditation on time, love, and the quiet performances of everyday life. This year marks not only a century of Clarissa's walk across London but a return to the web of feeling that pulses beneath the novel's stream-of-consciousness style. At its heart is a triptych of love stories, Clarissa and her husband Richard, Clarissa and her childhood friend Sally Seton, Clarissa and herself, and, hovering just beyond the page, another marriage: Virginia and Leonard Woolf. A marriage of two minds Virginia and Leonard married in 1912. She was luminous, volatile, brilliant. He was steady, cerebral, and deeply devoted. Their marriage, like Clarissa's, was not defined by passion alone but by an intricate choreography of companionship, caretaking, and creative cohabitation. Together they founded the Hogarth Press from their dining table in Richmond, hand-printing and publishing some of the twentieth century's most radical writing, including Mrs. Dalloway. Leonard typed the manuscript; Virginia, with trembling hands and a mind always on the edge, reworked the sentences until they flowed like breath. It was a novel she had to write, and he ensured she could. In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia gave us a marriage that echoes her own: a partnership defined as much by what is unsaid as what is spoken aloud. Richard Dalloway, who cannot say "I love you" to his wife, buys her flowers instead. Clarissa, who once kissed Sally Seton in the garden at Bourton and called it the "most exquisite moment of her whole life," now hosts parties, listens for Big Ben, and thinks of lost chances. It is a novel filled with ghost loves: those that could have been, those that almost were, those that continue in silence. But Virginia's genius lies in the way she resists simplifying love into a single narrative. Clarissa's feelings for Sally, blooming in youth and buried under layers of societal constraint, never vanish. Nor do they erupt into melodrama. They shimmer, instead, in small glances, brief memories, the way Sally "squeezed the water out of a sponge" at the sink. Richard, too, is not a villain or fool. He loves Clarissa, in his quiet, English way. And she, for all her longing, acknowledges the safety and structure he provides. What emerges is not a love triangle, but a love constellation: fragile, flickering, true. Clarissa's party becomes the stage upon which all these tensions play out: Sally arrives late, older and changed; Richard, as ever, present but opaque; Clarissa, radiant and alone in a room full of people. It is one of literature's most piercing explorations of married life; not its beginnings, but its weathered middle. To love many Outside the novel, Virginia was writing from inside her own complicated geometry of love. She had close, intimate relationships with women, most famously Vita Sackville-West, but never left Leonard. "You have been in every way all that one could be," she wrote to him in her last letter before she committed suicide in 1941. "I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been." It is a line that glows with love's strange alchemy: she loved others, but she chose him. The centenary of Mrs. Dalloway comes at a time when we are, once again, asking what it means to love in difficult times. In an age of climate anxiety, political collapse, and collective fatigue, Clarissa's insistence on beauty, on throwing a party, even as the world breaks, is radical. So too was Virginia's choice to write a book not about war itself, but about the quiet traumas it leaves behind. Septimus Warren Smith, the shell-shocked veteran whose story runs parallel to Clarissa's, is not healed by love. He is undone by a society that cannot comprehend his pain. His suicide, so carefully rendered, casts a long shadow over the Dalloways' drawing room. But love is not absent; it simply cannot save everything. Still, the marriage of the Woolfs, and the parallel one in the novel, reveals something deeper: that love, even when imperfect, can be a scaffolding for art. Leonard did not always understand Virginia's mental spirals, but he protected the space in which she could write. She, in turn, left behind some of the most luminous prose in the English language. The prose of Mrs. Dalloway is like no other. Virginia once wrote that she wanted to "follow the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall." And so she did. The novel flows without chapters, shifting seamlessly from one consciousness to another, rendering the texture of thought in motion. Virginia broke the rigid structures of Victorian fiction and created a modernism of empathy, one that allowed readers to live briefly inside many minds. At the time of its publication, Mrs. Dalloway was met with awe and some bewilderment. Critics admired its beauty but questioned its form. Today, it is canonical. It has inspired films, reimaginings, tributes, from Michael Cunningham's The Hours to experimental theatre adaptations. Penguin has released a centenary edition; institutions from Bloomsbury to Bombay have planned events, readings, and exhibits. Around the world, Clarissa walks again. Love at third sight In Karachi, where I first read Mrs. Dalloway as a teenager, the novel became a quiet compass. I did not know, then, that literature could be structured like time, like breath. That a woman thinking could be the plot. That love could be a thought remembered thirty years later and still burn. What Virginia gave us in Mrs. Dalloway is no grand romance but a mosaic of human bonds; she gave us the space between words, the pause before a confession, the petal that falls before the kiss. And she showed us that marriage, even without drama or climax, could be a place of deep, and difficult, love. As Clarissa throws her party, as the clocks strike, as the past and present fold into each other like silk, we remember: she is not just a character. She is a mirror. So too was Virginia, writing her way through pain, through passion, through partnership. One hundred years on, both women still walk through open doors, still gather the flowers, still greet the day. And in that moment, they are loved. Have something to add to the story? Share it in the comments below.
Express Tribune
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Mrs. Dalloway at 100
On May 14, 1925, a London flower shop became the unlikely threshold to literary history. It was the day Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway was published, introducing readers to Clarissa Dalloway, a poised yet introspective woman preparing for an evening party. Over the course of a single day, Virginia captured a vast emotional landscape. A century on, the novel endures as a profound meditation on time, love, and the quiet performances of everyday life. This year marks not only a century of Clarissa's walk across London but a return to the web of feeling that pulses beneath the novel's stream-of-consciousness style. At its heart is a triptych of love stories, Clarissa and her husband Richard, Clarissa and her childhood friend Sally Seton, Clarissa and herself, and, hovering just beyond the page, another marriage: Virginia and Leonard Woolf. A marriage of two minds Virginia and Leonard married in 1912. She was luminous, volatile, brilliant. He was steady, cerebral, and deeply devoted. Their marriage, like Clarissa's, was not defined by passion alone but by an intricate choreography of companionship, caretaking, and creative cohabitation. Together they founded the Hogarth Press from their dining table in Richmond, hand-printing and publishing some of the twentieth century's most radical writing, including Mrs. Dalloway. Leonard typed the manuscript; Virginia, with trembling hands and a mind always on the edge, reworked the sentences until they flowed like breath. It was a novel she had to write, and he ensured she could. In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia gave us a marriage that echoes her own: a partnership defined as much by what is unsaid as what is spoken aloud. Richard Dalloway, who cannot say "I love you" to his wife, buys her flowers instead. Clarissa, who once kissed Sally Seton in the garden at Bourton and called it the "most exquisite moment of her whole life," now hosts parties, listens for Big Ben, and thinks of lost chances. It is a novel filled with ghost loves: those that could have been, those that almost were, those that continue in silence. But Virginia's genius lies in the way she resists simplifying love into a single narrative. Clarissa's feelings for Sally, blooming in youth and buried under layers of societal constraint, never vanish. Nor do they erupt into melodrama. They shimmer, instead, in small glances, brief memories, the way Sally "squeezed the water out of a sponge" at the sink. Richard, too, is not a villain or fool. He loves Clarissa, in his quiet, English way. And she, for all her longing, acknowledges the safety and structure he provides. What emerges is not a love triangle, but a love constellation: fragile, flickering, true. Clarissa's party becomes the stage upon which all these tensions play out: Sally arrives late, older and changed; Richard, as ever, present but opaque; Clarissa, radiant and alone in a room full of people. It is one of literature's most piercing explorations of married life; not its beginnings, but its weathered middle. To love many Outside the novel, Virginia was writing from inside her own complicated geometry of love. She had close, intimate relationships with women, most famously Vita Sackville-West, but never left Leonard. "You have been in every way all that one could be," she wrote to him in her last letter before she committed suicide in 1941. "I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been." It is a line that glows with love's strange alchemy: she loved others, but she chose him. The centenary of Mrs. Dalloway comes at a time when we are, once again, asking what it means to love in difficult times. In an age of climate anxiety, political collapse, and collective fatigue, Clarissa's insistence on beauty, on throwing a party, even as the world breaks, is radical. So too was Virginia's choice to write a book not about war itself, but about the quiet traumas it leaves behind. Septimus Warren Smith, the shell-shocked veteran whose story runs parallel to Clarissa's, is not healed by love. He is undone by a society that cannot comprehend his pain. His suicide, so carefully rendered, casts a long shadow over the Dalloways' drawing room. But love is not absent; it simply cannot save everything. Still, the marriage of the Woolfs, and the parallel one in the novel, reveals something deeper: that love, even when imperfect, can be a scaffolding for art. Leonard did not always understand Virginia's mental spirals, but he protected the space in which she could write. She, in turn, left behind some of the most luminous prose in the English language. The prose of Mrs. Dalloway is like no other. Virginia once wrote that she wanted to "follow the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall." And so she did. The novel flows without chapters, shifting seamlessly from one consciousness to another, rendering the texture of thought in motion. Virginia broke the rigid structures of Victorian fiction and created a modernism of empathy, one that allowed readers to live briefly inside many minds. At the time of its publication, Mrs. Dalloway was met with awe and some bewilderment. Critics admired its beauty but questioned its form. Today, it is canonical. It has inspired films, reimaginings, tributes, from Michael Cunningham's The Hours to experimental theatre adaptations. Penguin has released a centenary edition; institutions from Bloomsbury to Bombay have planned events, readings, and exhibits. Around the world, Clarissa walks again. Love at third sight In Karachi, where I first read Mrs. Dalloway as a teenager, the novel became a quiet compass. I did not know, then, that literature could be structured like time, like breath. That a woman thinking could be the plot. That love could be a thought remembered thirty years later and still burn. What Virginia gave us in Mrs. Dalloway is no grand romance but a mosaic of human bonds; she gave us the space between words, the pause before a confession, the petal that falls before the kiss. And she showed us that marriage, even without drama or climax, could be a place of deep, and difficult, love. As Clarissa throws her party, as the clocks strike, as the past and present fold into each other like silk, we remember: she is not just a character. She is a mirror. So too was Virginia, writing her way through pain, through passion, through partnership. One hundred years on, both women still walk through open doors, still gather the flowers, still greet the day. And in that moment, they are loved.
Boston Globe
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
In defense of the em dash
There are But as some have Advertisement ChatGPT's writing is the product of the 90 Pulitzer Prize nominees from 1924 to 2020, 95 bestsellers from The New York Times and Publisher's Weekly in the same timeframe, and other works it was If you're feeling unsure about how to use the punctuation mark, the em dash (—) can be used to set off extra information — like a Shakespearean aside — in the middle of a longer passage. It functions like — and can be used instead of — commas or parentheses. With an em dash, you can rise above an ordinary train of thought as if on an observation deck — wow! Advertisement Citing one piece of punctuation to judge whether something has been written by artificial intelligence is dangerous. It could lead to teachers grading their students improperly or prospective hires being rejected. After all, great writers have used the em dash throughout history. In 'Mrs. Dalloway,' Virginia Woolf combined em dashes with semicolons and sprinkled them like seeds on the breeze: 'How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, 'Musing among the vegetables?' — was that it? — 'I prefer men to cauliflowers' — was that it?' The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once went comedically overboard in his journal to prove a point: 'I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself,' wrote Kierkegaard. Advertisement Being em-dash-happy isn't a style that ChatGPT invented, and we shouldn't give it credit for that. Real em dash fans have been singing its praises online for years. 'The em dash can also usurp the semicolon's glory — for it shows more than equality! The em dash has its own veritable inflection — its own tempo! One can use it profusely to show excitement and dynamism of thought,' — long before ChatGPT made its Kool-Aid-man-esque entrance into our lives. Now the em dash might need our help. A new generation of writers must feel free to use the fanciful — if sort of funky looking — punctuation in peace. It's there to let them set their creative impulses free. As one poster I use the em dash because it allows me to construct sentences — castles of thought, really — that contain unexpected, experimentally jazzy multitudes. Long story short — they're fun. I will not let ChatGPT — the 'helpful' roommate who dyes all your white socks beige in the wash of literature — make writing less fun.
