To the Lighthouse

“I put off To the Lighthouse for a long time, in order to live in delicious anticipation of it… . Yet this pleasure can be drawn out for only so long; if you are a reader, the morning comes when you must greet it along with the sun… . There is never the sense, opening To the Lighthouse, that it could have been anything else. It opens with the weather, just like the real day. It rises to some occasion, wakes with the lark to meet the weekend―moves ‘with an indescribable air of expectation,’ because it is going to meet someone around the corner, and with the shock of encounter you sometimes feel in reading, you find that it is you.” ―Patricia Lockwood, from the Foreword “I reread this book every once in a while, and every time I do I find it more capacious and startling. It’s so revolutionary and so exquisitely wrought that it keeps evolving on its own somehow, as if it’s alive.” —Alison Bechdel “I know of no more gut-wrenching, soaring prose about shared consciousness, mortality and water. Truly a book for the cradle to the grave.” —Maggie Nelson “This novel is just astonishing in its depth and reach and beauty. There is really nothing else like it, and no matter how many times I read it I find myself shocked at what Woolf was able to do.” —Meg Wolitzer “A classic for a reason. My mind was warped into a new shape by her prose and it will never be the same again.” —Greta Gerwig “My admiration for this book is complete. It is as beautiful, poignant, and ruthless as anything I have ever read.” —Siri Hustvedt “Woolf’s groundbreaking novel is still one of the best available accounts of self-mythologizing middle-class family life and its oppressive construction of male and female identity.” —Rachel Cusk “One of the greatest elegies in the English language, a book which transcends time.” —Margaret Drabble “Without question one of the two or three finest novels of the twentieth century. Woolf comments on the most pressing dramas of our human predicament: war, mortality, family, love. If you’re like me you’ll come back to this book often, always astounded, always moved, always refreshed.” —Rick Moody “She was doing with language something like what Jimi Hendrix does with a guitar.” —Michael Cunningham “Radiant … I think that beyond being about the very nature of reality, it is itself a vision of reality.” —Eudora Welty “Thrillingly introspective.” —The Independent “At the head of all Virginia Woolf’s work.” —The New York Times

Alison Bechdel is the author of the bestselling memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which was named a Best Book of the Year by Time, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, People, among others. For twenty-five years, she wrote and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a visual chronicle of modern life—queer and otherwise—considered ‘one of the preeminent oeuvres in the comics genre.’

Alison Bechdel is guest editor of Best American Comics, 2011, and has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney’s, Entertainment Weekly, Granta, and The New York Times Book Review. In 2014 she was named as one of the recipients of the MacArthur Foundation Grant.

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