Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf [Paperback]

SHORTLISTED FOR THE QWF MAVIS GALLANT PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION

THE GLOBE 100: THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022

From LAMBDA Literary Award winner Sina Queyras,Roomsoffers a peek into the defining spaces a young queer writer moved through as they found their way from a life of chaos to a life of the mind

Thirty years ago, a professor threw a chair at Sina Queyras after they’d turned in an essay on Virginia Woolf.

Queyras returns to that contentious first encounter with Virginia Woolf to recover the body and thinking of that time. Using Woolf’sA Room of One’s Ownas a touchstone, this book is both an homage to and provocation of the idea of a room of one’s own at the centre of our idea of a literary life.

How central is the room? And what happens once we get one? Do we inhabit our rooms? Or do the rooms contain us? Blending memoir, prose, tweets, poetry, and criticism,Roomsoffers a peek into the defining spaces a young queer writer moved through as they found their way from a life of chaos to a life of the mind, and from a very private life of the mind to a public life of the page, and from a life of the page into a life in the Academy, the Internet, and on social media.

"With Virginia Woolf alongside them, Queyras journeys through rooms literal and figurative, complicating and deepening our understanding of what it means to create space for oneself as a writer. Their hard-won language challenges us to resist any glib associations of Woolf’s famous ‘room’ with an easy freedom. Inspiring and moving, Queyras’s memoir testifies to Woolf’s continuing generative power."—Mark Hussey, editor of Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (2011) and author of Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism
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