Jacob's Room

From the Inside Flap Virginia Woolf's first original and distinguished work, Jacob's Room is the story of a sensitive young man named Jacob Flanders. The life story, character and friends of Jacob are presented in a series for separate scenes and moments from his childhood, through college at Cambridge, love affairs in London, and travels in Greece, to his death in the war. Jacob's Room established Virginia Woolf's reputation as a highly poetic and symbolic writer who places emphasis not on plot or action but on the psychological realm of occupied by her characters. Product Description Virginia Woolf's third novel, Jacob's Room, marked a radical, new departure in her style: the most experimental of all her novels, it enacts the 'smashing and crashing' of form that Woolf called for in the modernist movement. Set in pre-war England, the novel tells the life story of Jacob Flanders. Through the collective memories of those who knew him, we follow his childhood, through to his time at Cambridge, and then into adulthood. Jacob's Room is an evocative and poignant story, made more so so as Woolf describes scenes and characters with a beauty unsurpassed. The author combines language in a majestic manner as she meditates on the inexorable flux of life and provides an elegiac stream found in her best-known work such as To the Lighthouse From AudioFile Jacob is so hard to manage. Ever since his father, Seabrook Flanders, passed away, he has been a somewhat aimless boy. As Jacob grows, we watch his aimless spirit wander like a butterfly from flower to flower, sipping nectar, but never lighting for long in one spot. Nadia May reads Virginia Woolf's stream of consciousness--her cataloging of voices and images--with such force and authority that gradually in the poetry of these images, a character, albeit somewhat lost and stillborn, breaks through into a hollow world, exactly as Woolf intended. It is the narrator's assurance, as it was the writer's belief before her, that this stream of consciousness cataloging would produce both world and character, and so it does. P.E.F. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine Review "amazing.... a new type of fiction has swum into view." -- E. M Forster"I wanted them all, even those I'd already read."--Ron Rosenbaum, "The New York Observer" "Small wonders."--"Time Out London" """[F]irst-rate...astutely selected and attractively packaged...indisputably great works."--Adam Begley, "The New York Observer" "I've always been haunted by Bartleby, the proto-slacker. But it's the handsomely minimalist cover of the Melville House edition that gets me here, one of many in the small publisher's fine 'Art of the Novella' series."--"The New Yorker" "The Art of the Novella series is sort of an anti-Kindle. What these singular, distinctive titles celebrate is book-ness. They're slim enough to be portable but showy enough to be conspicuously consumed--tiny little objects that demand to be loved for the commodities they are."--KQED (NPR San Francisco) "Some like it short, and if you're one of them, Melville House, an independent publisher based in Brooklyn, has a line of books for you... eleg About the Author Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English novelist, essayist, diarist, epistler, publisher, feminist, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." “Jacob’s Room” is a departure from Virginia Woolf's earlier novels, ”The Voyage Out” and “Night and Day,” which are more conventional in form. The work is seen as an important modernist t