Here’s my recent Boston Review piece on Virginia Woolf, Mikhail Bakhtin, David Shields, James Wood, Benjamin Kunkel, Yvonne Vera, and other luminaries. My original title was, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” But then I had a feeling that Edward Albee would ring my doorbell in the middle of the night.
Huge props for the hat-tip to Yvonne Vera. One of the greatest and most singular writers of our time. I teach Butterfly Burning regularly, and watching students who balk at “difficult” writing suddenly digging into her prose is always a revelation. I always expect them to have trouble with her, and they always, miraculously, *don’t*.
Jess, I really enjoyed this essay. Many of the comments in the comments section baffled me–I wondered if they’d purposely mis-read your essay or if they’d just not read it closely. Thanks for this–Sybil