"It is twenty-five years since the Hogarth Press launched its edition of Woolf’s essays. Stuart N. Clarke, who took over the editorship from Andrew McNeillie after Volume Four, now completes the series with essays published between 1933 and 1941."

— Trev Broughton, from "Virginia Woolf's Late Essays" in The Times Literary Supplement

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Marianne Brandt, Ashtray, 1924 (via MoMA; see the website for their exhibition on German Expressionism)

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"No one wants to reopen the wounds; no one wants to stick           the gored. We can call this a new 'happy problem.'

                                                            'The only way,'

says I; says the old I; says the unmanhandled I and I recall this could be a tasty thing. Let me draw my neck out—just so to see.
                                                                            I want to see how willing the 'I' is. Just to see how willing 'I' am. How willing 'I' should be.

And, yes, yes, someone said yes, someone said yes to me. I was unsafe and I was safe and I was oh so ready."

— Leah Umansky, from "Life is a Verb" (via BOMBlog)

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"How many books will Alan Hollinghurst have to write before the press stops asking him about his sexuality? When will the beauty of his words simply be enough?"

— Elizabeth Minkel in The New Yorker on Alan Hollinghurst's writing and his forthcoming book, The Stranger's Child

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"Nabokov treated fame as if it were a novel to be read or written according to the details. ... So it comes as no surprise that Nabokov staged a photo for Life Magazine in 1959 in which he is seen writing Lolita on notecards in the Nabokov family sedan, after the novel had been published. Or that he gladly appeared on the cover of Time in 1969 and Newsweek in 1962. Or that he corrected Carl Proffer’s Keys to Lolita and revised Andrew Field’s biography of him, saying that his life resembled 'a bibliography rather than a biography' and that the best part of a writer's biography is not 'the record of his adventures but the story of his style.' Or that he tightly controlled the collection of his short stories, compiling them according to 'theme, period, atmosphere, uniformity, variety.' Or that he translated his early Russian novels, such as Bend Sinister, Despair, and The Luzhin Defense, as well as the autobiography that became known as Speak, Memory, into English himself, making substantial revisions and adding prefaces to the texts. Or that he conducted and wrote all of his interviews himself."

— Sarah Fay, from "Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of the Self-Interview" at The Paris Review