title: Granite and Rainbow: The Hidden Life of Virginia Woolf
author: Mitchell Leaska
description: "Another book about Virginia Woolf?" you cry, and not entirely without cause. One may well wonder what remains to be said about Woolf after Hermione Lee's 1997 biography, but then, biography is as much about the prism through which the subject's life is viewed as it is about the subject. (Besides, if we stopped writing biographies of people after the publication of very good ones, Quentin Bell would have had the last word on Woolf back in 1972.) Mitchell Leaska, a professor of humanities at NYU, has devoted his academic career to the study of Woolf's writing, and while he uncovers no surprising new facts about her life, he weaves a masterful interpretation of those facts that shows, in part by quoting extensively from her own writings, how her life informed her work.
zlib_text: Margaret Atwood ORYX AND CRAKE
  
  First Published in 2003
  
  For my family
  
  I could perhaps like others have astonished you with strange improbable tales;
  but I rather chose to relate plain matter of fact in the simplest manner and
  style; because my principal design was to inform you, and not to amuse you.
  Jonathan Swift, _Gulliver's Travels_
  
  Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide,
  no shelter, but all was miracle and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into
  the air? Virginia Woolf, _To the Lighthouse_
  
  1
  
  Mango
  
  Snowman wakes before dawn. He lies unmoving, listening to the tide coming in,
  wave after wave sloshing over the various barricades, wish-wash, wish-wash,
  the rhythm of heartbeat. He would so like to believe he is still asleep. On
  the eastern horizon there's a greyish haze, lit now with a rosy, deadly glow.
  Strange how that colour still seems tender. The offshore towers stand out in
  dark silhouette against it, rising improbably out of the pink