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    Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury
    Unavailable
    Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury
    Unavailable
    Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury
    Ebook127 pages1 hour

    Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury

    By Sigrid Nunez and Peter Cameron

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    One of NPR's Best Books of the Year

    “The tender biography of a sickly marmoset that was adopted by Leonard Woolf and became a fixture of Bloomsbury society.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

    “In short, glistening sentences that refract the larger world, Ms. Nunez describes the appealingly eccentric, fiercely intelligent Woolfs during a darkening time.” —The Wall Street Journal

     By the National Book Award–winning author of The Friend

    In 1934, a "sickly pathetic marmoset” named Mitz came into the care of Leonard Woolf. After he nursed her back to health, she became a ubiquitous presence in Bloomsbury society. Moving with Leonard and Virginia Woolf between their homes in London and Sussex, she developed her own special relationship with each of them, as well as with their pet cocker spaniels and with various members of the Woolfs’ circle, among them T. S. Eliot and Vita Sackville-West. Mitz also helped the Woolfs escape a close call with Nazis during a trip through Germany just before the outbreak of World War II. Using letters, diaries, memoirs, and other archival documents, Nunez reconstructs Mitz’s life against the background of Bloomsbury’s twilight years. This tender and imaginative mock biography offers a striking look at the lives of writers and artists shadowed by war, death, and mental breakdown, and at the solace and amusement inspired by its tiny subject. A new edition, with an afterword by Peter Cameron and a never-before-published letter about Mitz by Nigel Nicolson.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSoft Skull Press
    Release dateAug 6, 2019
    ISBN9781593765835
    Unavailable
    Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury
    Author

    Sigrid Nunez

    Sigrid Nunez is the New York Times bestselling author of The Friend, winner of the 2018 National Book Award, and of several other novels, including What Are You Going Through and The Last of Her Kind. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Her work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

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    Reviews for Mitz

    4/5

    26 ratings4 reviews

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    • 3/5
      First, let me say that I agree with Vita Sackville-West's assessment of Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas as a book filled with "misleading arguments". Now that I have made that clear, I can add that I enjoyed this delightful short romp through the lives of Virginia and her husband Leonard Woolf and, of course, Mitz, the marmoset that adopted them and became a member of their family for a short while. Sigrid Nunez captures the flavor of Bloomsbury in this novella while providing details about the lives of its inhabitants that I would presume are as new to many readers as they were to me. While I have read fine and lengthy biographies of Lytton Strachey and Lord Keynes I am not enough of a Bloomsbury aficionado to find this book anything but entertaining in the tidbits about the health and sickness, and the quotidian details of the everyday lives of this trio. The inclusion of the interaction of the Bells, Sackville-West and others in their circle added to the veridical character of the story. Outside of warm, fuzzy, purring cats I am not an animal-lover (and even cats make me sneeze after too much of them up close), but I could still understand the relationship Leonard and Virginia developed with their marmoset friend. Nunez has written a small masterpiece built upon the sort of humaneness that can only be seen when reflected in the eyes of a small mammal with big heart.
    • 3/5
      Occasionally delightful one-day read, although it is more or less written in the style of children's literature and does not offer much new to those already interested in the Woolfs, Bloomsbury, or marmosets generally. And why else would one pick it up?
    • 4/5
      Mitz was Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Marmoset. Much in the same way that V. Woolf told the story of Elizabeth Barret Browning through her spaniel Flush's eyes, Sigrid Nunez does the same for the Woolf's via Mitz. I listened to this book on audible and loved it.
    • 4/5
      A nice biography of Leonard and Virginia Woolf's marmoset, Mitz. Nunez, using letters and diaries, rells the story of Mitz as a means to give the reader a simple history of the Woolf's life as a couple just prior to WWII. A glimpse, a glimmer, a peek. A pleasure.