Free Ebook All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf, by Katharine Smyth
When somebody concerns you to visit the collection as well as obtain some publications to check out, exactly what's your response? Occasionally, that's not the proper time to see it. Yeah, lazy is the large reason of why many people opt to most likely to the library. You could likewise have no adequate time to choose. Currently, we present for you reserve soft documents or on-line publication to review. Without going to the collection, without hanging out for going to guide shops, this kind of book is offered by on-line with internet connection in the beginning.
All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf, by Katharine Smyth
Free Ebook All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf, by Katharine Smyth
Exactly how is your time to invest the spare time in this day? Are you starting to do a new activity? Will you attempt to review? Everyone understands and agrees that reading is a good practice. You need to review as well as read, in addition guide with many benefits. However, is that true? There are just few people that love to review. If you are one of them, it is excellent for you. We will certainly give you a new publication that could make your life improved to be much better.
Reading is except other people that obligate or order you to review. The one that could enjoy as well as make use of the advantages of analysis is you. So, it is not sort of worse when you are attempting to be far better by analysis. Even reading will certainly not lead you to be successful 100%; by doing this could help you to satisfy the condition, lesson, experience, and also knowledge. Furthermore, this book entitled All The Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace In Virginia Woolf, By Katharine Smyth also becomes one that is really prominent.
The soft documents implies that you should visit the web link for downloading and install and afterwards save All The Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace In Virginia Woolf, By Katharine Smyth You have actually owned the book to review, you have actually presented this All The Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace In Virginia Woolf, By Katharine Smyth It is not difficult as visiting the book shops, is it? After getting this short description, ideally you can download and install one as well as start to review All The Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace In Virginia Woolf, By Katharine Smyth This book is quite easy to review each time you have the free time.
So, all people that read All The Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace In Virginia Woolf, By Katharine Smyth will certainly seem like doing the things by themselves. It depends on just how the visitors gaze and also consider this publication. But, typically, it actually features the amazing ideas of guide analysis. It will additionally offer you the outstanding systems of creative thinking. Certainly, it will offer you much better idea of excellences. It is why we constantly provide you the best publication that could make your life better. Currently, really feel the life to obtain the remarkable means of book accomplishment.
Review
Praise for All the Lives We Ever Lived: "[Smyth’s] prose is so fluid and clear throughout that it’s not surprising to observe her view of her family, its cracks and fissures, sharpen into unsparing focus... Her exploration of grown-up love, the kind that accounts for who the loved one actually is, not who you want him or her to be, gains power and grace as her story unfolds. I suspect her book could itself become solace for people navigating their way through the complexities of grief for their fallen idols. And they will be lucky to have it." — Radhika Jones, New York Times Book Review "This is a transcendent book, not a simple meditation on one woman’s loss, but a reflection on all of our losses, on loss itself, on how to remember and commemorate our dead." — Washington Post "Katharine Smyth pulls off a tricky double homage in her beautifully written first book, a deft blend of memoir, biography, and literary criticism that’s a gift to readers drawn to big questions about time, memory, mortality, love and grief... you'd be hard put to find a more moving appreciation of Woolf's work." — Heller McAlpin, Wall Street Journal "This searching memoir pays homage to To the Lighthouse, while recounting the author’s fraught relationship with her beloved father, a vibrant figure afflicted with alcoholism and cancer.... Smyth’s writing is evocative and incisive." — The New Yorker "Like H Is for Hawk, Smyth’s book is a memoir that’s not quite a memoir, using Woolf, and her obsession with Woolf, as a springboard to tell the story of her father’s vivid life and sad demise due to alcoholism and cancer....an experiment in 21st-century introspection that feels rooted in a modernist tradition and bracingly fresh." — Vogue "Blending analysis of a deeply literary novel with a personal story... gently entwining observations from Woolf's classic with her own layered experience. Smyth tells us of her love for her father, his profound alcoholism and the unpredictable course of the cancer that ultimately claimed his life." — TIME "Brilliant... Smyth’s beautiful debut is more tightly strung together than you’d imagine a memoir-cum-literary-requiem could be. It is innovative, like Woolf, in its power of association and its ability to transform the intangible nature of grief into a warm, graspable, fleshy mass." — Vulture "The affinity between Smyth and her subject is profound even on the sentence level. She writes in Woolfian rhythms. Her sentences cascade and linger over transcendent images... a consolation, a shelter and a community, an unending conversation about mortality and loss that creates unity from the fragmentation of life and death." — HuffPost "This gorgeous, moving book gracefully moves between memoir and literary criticism.... Smyth’s writing possesses a unique ability to wend its way into your head, traveling into all the darkest corners of your mind, triggering thoughts on love and loss and family and memory you hadn’t known were lurking; it’s a profound experience, reading this book—one not to be missed." — Nylon "Smyth is an elegant writer and she explores her deep, complicated love for her father in lyrical yet restrained prose." — Literary Review (UK) “A conceptually ambitious and assured debut, successfully bridging memoir and literary criticism…. A work of incisive observation and analysis, exquisite writing, and an attempt to determine if there is 'any revelation that could lessen loss, that could help to make the fact of death okay.'” —Kirkus Reviews (starred) “All The Lives We Ever Lived is a lyrical memoir about Katharine Smyth's connection to Virginia Woolf's writing, and the power of literature in our darkest times.” —Bustle “[Smyth] expertly dissects the finest gradations of emotion in any given scene… All the Lives We Ever Lived is a powerful book, driven by the engine of Smyth’s controlled, rich description. It’s an astonishingly clear-eyed portrait of a person through myriad lenses, a kind of prismatic attempt to capture a life.” — The Boston Globe “A daughter coping with her father’s illness and death takes a deep dive into Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, looking for insight and comfort… Other writers have attempted similarly braided memoirs with mixed success. Katharine Smyth… has more than lived up to her premise, delivering a lyrical and thoughtful examination of character, place and grief.” — Providence Journal “Smyth’s prose pulsates with intensity, and its lyrical qualities make [the book] a moving one. Grief and its disconcerting effects take center stage. ‘It’s writers like Woolf, their refusal to give in to popular ideas about bereavement, who have helped me to accept the nature of this misery,’ Smyth writes. With her first book, Smyth is able to give that comfort to a new generation of readers as well.” — BookPage “All the Lives We Ever Lived [is] Katharine Smyth’s powerful memoir about her father’s death… What sets All the Lives apart from other memoirs about grief or alcoholism (and it has much to say about both topics) is that it is also a book about reading, the ways ‘the one book for every life’ can, in Smyth’s words, ‘reciprocate and even alter [our] experience’… There are many lovely moments when Smyth’s prose soars into poetry.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune“I loved All the Lives We Ever Lived: its structural inventiveness, its fluid and lyrically beautiful writing—some lines made me gasp—and its often astonishing wisdom. But above all, this is a smart, moving portrait of a family in crisis; Smyth weaves literary criticism and biography into nearly every page, but she never strays from the deepest concerns of the human heart.”—Jamie Quatro, author of Fire Sermon and I Want to Show You More“All the Lives We Ever Lived is a work of vivid intelligence—a sharp love letter to the reading and relationships that shape us, and an ingenious reply to the questions Woolf asked her readers to answer for themselves.”—Nell Stevens, author of Bleaker House and The Victorian and the Romantic“Modern American memoir doesn't get better—or more inventive—than this. By weaving the story of her father's death with a meditation on Virginia Woolf's great novel, Katharine Smyth has written a book that is both fiercely moving and full of bristling intelligence. All the Lives We Ever Lived isn't just a literary tour de force; it's an enlarging reminder of the evanescence of our lives. Smyth has twinned her sensibility with Woolf's to extraordinary effect. A wonderful debut.”—Darcy Frey, author of The Last Shot“A stunningly well-written, exquisitely intelligent and moving book, which deepens with each turn of the screw.”—Phillip Lopate, author of A Mother's Tale “In her brilliant debut, Katharine Smyth has done the impossible—invented a new form for the overworked genre of memoir, weaving Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse into her personal story as she absorbs the meaning of her beloved father’s long illness and early death. Her prose is luxuriant and supple, but never sentimental, and her piercing insights into the dynamics of the nuclear family often profound.”—Michael Scammell, author of Koestler and Solzhenitsyn“In channeling her experience of loss through her lifelong reading of Virginia Woolf, Smyth upends the rules of a genre and delivers a book at once deeply intellectual and deeply felt, heartbreaking, funny, illuminating, and truly new.” —Lea Carpenter, author of Eleven Days and Red, White, Blue“Losing then finding herself in To the Lighthouse, Katharine Smyth bestows time travel between Virginia Woolf's memory and her own, reminding us that a book can open the heart.” —Honor Moore, author of The Bishop's Daughter“In this remarkable memoir of familial love, illness, and grief, Katharine Smyth seamlessly braids her story around that of her literary idol, Virginia Woolf, and around that writer's most enduring characters. All the Lives We Ever Lived is enlightening and absolutely original, with writing that is gentle, elegant, and true.”—Marcia DeSanctis, author of 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go
Read more
About the Author
Katharine Smyth is a graduate of Brown University. She has worked for The Paris Review and taught at Columbia University, where she received her MFA in nonfiction. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Read more
See all Editorial Reviews
Product details
Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Crown (January 29, 2019)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1524760625
ISBN-13: 978-1524760625
Product Dimensions:
5.8 x 1.1 x 8.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.2 out of 5 stars
22 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#22,725 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
All the Lives We Ever Lived is a difficult but rewarding book. One difficulty is it assumes a familiarity with Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. I, like the author, love this book but it is not part of a standard American curricula. Another difficulty is its telling of the story of the passing of the author’s father. An unflinching look at death is, for better or for worse, rare in our culture. Finally, the book is not in the typical memoir genre. The author’s encounter with human mortality provides commentary on Woolf while Woolf helps her understand her own experiences. In other words, the book doesn’t engage in traditional literary criticism.It is, however, a unique account and perspective. The author writes so hauntingly of dying that I had to put the book down sometimes lest I fell into depression. The writing is at the same time so fluid, so beautiful in itself, that one wants to keep turning and turning the page.The questions the author deals with sound banal when not instantiated in real life. Why is nature so unfeeling? Does everything we love end in entropic nothingness? How do we best mourn our loved ones? Can secular humanity find any solace when confronted with death or is it merely one long bleak dance with winter?While both Woolf’s and the author’s experiences were harrowing, Smyth does find in Woolf some solace. She sees the unique striving for life embedded in the human heart as continuing, stripped of all individuality, from generation to generation. While memory fades and even the ephemera of our dwellings and belongings recede into not, that inchoate love of all things human does not die a second death but is passed on to our descendants. Banal in the recounting, one must read the book to get the full effect.I would recommend this book to everyone but the author’s choice of assuming basic knowledge of To the Lighthouse makes me think that only devotees of Woolf, or at least those familiar with her, will find the book as captivating as I did. Even so, maybe this book will persuade some non-devotees to read To the Lighthouse. Woolf’s heart beats on.
"All the Lives We Ever Lived" feels like a new kind of book—one that uses great art, Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse," as a lens to view more clearly the author's own loss, and ends up becoming a shelter itself for our losses as readers.We learn about the author's father, who was a larger-than-life figure (similar to Mrs. Ramsey in "To the Lighthouse") but battled with alcoholism and ultimately succumbed to cancer. The prose is elegant and precise, filled with insights that forced me to pause, put down the page, and consider my own relationships.Really powerful stuff. I hadn't read "To the Lighthouse" before reading "All the Lives" but that didn't impact my understanding. It actually inspired me to pick up Woolf's book.Highly recommend "All the Lives" for readers looking for a beautiful read that asks the big questions: how can we even attempt to understand the loss of our favorite people, how can we come to terms with who those people really were, do we even want to know?
All the lives we ever lived will not find a home on my library shelves. It reads like a Ph.D thesis, including some ten words I did not know existed in the English language (capuscular, for example) and another several that I had never spoken or needed to express myself, such as evanescent. I am certain the examining Board would be impressed.The mourning, which she correctly reminds us is done by one and all of us at some time, continues tiresomely, long after the point is made. She is brilliant but can be boring and tedious.
I was really taken by this book, which caught me by surprise. I wanted to read it mostly out of clinical interest to how she would work a modern story around Virginia Woolf. I had never read Woolf's "Lighthouse" book, so I wasn't expecting to be that connected either way.But her story about her father, and reflections on how her father confronted disappointments and compromises was very affecting. Her father was not that old - 59 - and that's sure not as old as it used to be. A lot of the things she describes her father living through are a lot more relevant to me than they would have been a few years back. On the other hand, she's also writing about saying goodbye to a parent and that's something else that becomes more concrete and less abstract with age.I wasn't always excited about the Woolf digressions - because I'm not familiar with the book - but I could follow the connections she made. A few hit home - she relates how Woolf's characters go to a childhood home and stand outside. The feeling is of being a ghost - a shade from the past lurking at the doorstop, but never coming in. I've been that person too.I'm hesitant to give five stars, because the Woolf sections do require SOME knowledge for the most appreciation, which I didn't have. But the personal stories were all very affecting in a way that never drooped into mid-age ennui.Any audience of middle age adults will 'enjoy' the reckoning that Smyth is both experiencing and capturing. A fan of Woolf will no doubt appreciate these links. All in all, very, very good.
All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf, by Katharine Smyth PDF
All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf, by Katharine Smyth EPub
All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf, by Katharine Smyth Doc
All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf, by Katharine Smyth iBooks
All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf, by Katharine Smyth rtf
All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf, by Katharine Smyth Mobipocket
All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf, by Katharine Smyth Kindle
All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf, by Katharine Smyth PDF
All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf, by Katharine Smyth PDF
All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf, by Katharine Smyth PDF
All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf, by Katharine Smyth PDF
