The Mumpsimus

When I heard, a few months ago, that Paul La Farge's new novel would be about H.P. Lovecraft , I groaned. For one thing, I don't care much about Lovecraft; for another, there's a boom in people writing about Lovecraft these days. Good writers, too! Not just the hacks of fandom churning out their unintentionally almost-funny imitations, not just cretins of the sort who bought Weird Tales  because they would rather run it into the ground than have anybody taint its legacy with stories that aren't imitations of Lovecraft — no, I'm talking about  good  writers, interesting  writers, original  writers, and— And then comes the announcement about Paul La Farge, a writer I've enjoyed for almost twenty years now, ever since a friend of mine spent some time at the MacDowell Colony when he was there and told me, "There's a guy here who writes weird surrealist stuff you'd like," and when I went to visit her we stopped by the Toadstool Bookstore in P...

It is time for a capacious, authoritative one-volume selection of Virginia Woolf's essays and journalism. (Perhaps one is in preparation. I don't know.) The sixth and final volume of her collected essays was released in 2011. It is wondrous, as are all of the volumes in the series, but though it's a goldmine for scholars, the series isn't really aimed at the everyday reader; each volume is relatively expensive (though not to the extent of an academic volume, e.g. the Cambridge Editions ), and plenty of the material is ephemeral, repetitive, or esoteric. A one-volume Selected Essays  does exist, edited by David Bradshaw and published by Oxford World's Classics. It's better than nothing, but it's small and missing many of Woolf's best essays — including perhaps her single most-frequently-reprinted essay, "The Death of the Moth" . Bradshaw also slights Woolf's literary essays, perhaps because the two Common Reader  volumes remain in pri...

Andrew Haigh wrote and directed one of my favorite films of the century so far, Weekend , and his 2015 movie 45 Years  is based on David Constantine's breathtaking short story  "In Another Country"  — as rich and perfect a story as you're ever likely to read. For these reasons, I put off seeing the movie for a long time, because I feared it could not live up to my hopes and expectations for it. And no, it couldn't live up to my hopes and expectations, and my hopes and expectations did, indeed, get in the way — but it's still an impressive film. In particular, the performances and the cinematography are magnificent. The plot of 45 Years  is simple, and starts right from the second scene: An older couple, Kate and Geoff, are getting ready to celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary, having not been able to celebrate their 40th because of Geoff's heart bypass surgery. That week, Geoff receives an official letter letting him know that a body has been ...