Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (Soft Skull Press, 2007)
“At that time I had a marmoset called Mitz which accompanied me everywhere, sitting on my shoulder or inside my waistcoat.”—Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way
From the citation for the 1999 Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation
Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters:
A lesson to all of us who foolishly believed that Flush exhausted the unpromising genre of pet biography, Mitz takes Flush back to the muse, the marmoset that briefly belonged to Virginia and Leonard Woolf. In prose so lucid, so supple, so exquisitely entertaining we only slowly realize we are in the presence of art, Sigrid Nunez constructs a diagram of love and solicitude and abiding solitude: Mitz is tender, astute, wise, funny, and deeply, unsentimentally sad—for all its charm, a novel of masterly formal intelligence.
"Nunez takes great risks with this novel…. [A]t its very best
the book takes on the edginess of Mrs. Dalloway." —Chicago
Tribune
"Mitz
shimmers with an emotional truth missing from the most rigorous Bloomsbury
histories." —Editors’ Choices / The Village Voice
“In short, glistening sentences that refract the larger world, Ms. Nunez describes the appealingly eccentric, fiercely intelligent Woolfs during a darkening time.”—Wall Street Journal