Praise for Mitz
“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.”
—From the citation for the 1999 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters
“An inventive, intelligent, thoroughly researched and alive creation . . . an absolutely miraculous achievement of intellectual imagination . . . Viva Mitz!”
—ALICE SEBOLD, author of The Lovely Bones
“Delight! Nunez is the absolute best. She is the only writer I know with enough delicacy, subtlety, intelligence, and wit to be a marmoset’s biographer. I adored this book, as small and as brilliant as that little star, Mitz, the marmoset herself. All this, and with it a splendid portrait of the two Woolves, Leonard and Virginia, as well. I learned much that is important about marmosets and about the Bloomsbury group from Mitz, and for both insights, I’m grateful.”
—ELIZABETH MARSHALL THOMAS, author of The Hidden Life of Dogs
“Nunez takes great risks with this novel . . . At 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.”
—The Village Voice, Editors’ Choice
“In short, glistening sentences that refract the larger world, Ms. Nunez describes the appealingly eccentric, fiercely intelligent Woolfs during a darkening time.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“The tender biography of a sickly marmoset that was adopted by Leonard Woolf and became a fixture of Bloomsbury society.”
—The New York Times
“Mitz succeeds charmingly in portraying the Woolfs’ companionable writerly routine (as well as their darker days), and in being sympathetic (but not sentimental) toward Leonard’s peculiar pet. Among the flurry of Bloomsbury books, Mitz stands out for taking a (Virginia) Woolf-like imaginative leap.”
—Hartford Courant
“Though it’s factually based on diaries, letters, and memoirs, Nunez’s Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury still offers a slice of pure whimsy.”
—Entertainment Weekly
Selected Praise for Sigrid Nunez
“A crisply philosophical and undervalued novelist . . . Dry, allusive and charming . . . The snap of her sentences sometimes put me in mind of Rachel Cusk.”
—DWIGHT GARNER, The New York Times
“Nunez’s prose itself comforts us. Her confident and direct style uplifts—the music in her sentences, her deep and varied intelligence.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Nunez has a wry, withering wit.”
—NPR
“Nunez’s writing is haunting and poignant . . . It is, in one word, unforgettable.”
—Travel + Leisure
“Graceful, respectful, and achingly honest.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Sigrid Nunez has long been one of my favorite authors because she writes with the deepest intelligence, the truest heart, and the most surprising sense of humor.”
—GARY SHTEYNGART, author of Lake Success and Super Sad True Love Story
“Nunez is adept at capturing subtle frictions in the interactions between class, race and gender . . . [She] writes with sophisticated insight.”
—The Seattle Times
“When the apocalypse comes, I want Nunez in my life-boat.”
—Vanity Fair
“Nunez’s writing is gorgeously spare.”
—The Boston Globe
“Remarkable . . . We know immediately we are in the hands of a major talent able to open up a complex history for us . . . [Nunez’s] gift is wild and large.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Nunez’s piercing intelligence and post-feminist consciousness may well feel that writing the Great American novel is no longer a feasible or worthwhile goal—but damned if she hasn’t gone and done it anyway.”
—Salon
“[Sigrid Nunez’s] writing is rich and subtly textured.”
—Star-Tribune (Minneapolis)
“[Nunez] takes us beneath the surface to the essential mysteries of the human heart.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Nunez’s voice is unflinching and intimate.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“[Sigrid Nunez’s] spare voice . . . gives even the simplest descriptions of place and weather unsettling force and beauty.”
—The Village Voice
“A writer of uncommon talent.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“An uncompromising talent.”
—Vogue
ALSO BY SIGRID NUNEZ
A Feather on the Breath of God
Naked Sleeper
For Rouenna
The Last of Her Kind
Salvation City
Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag
The Friend
MITZ: THE MARMOSET OF BLOOMSBURY
Copyright © 1998 by Sigrid Nunez
Afterword copyright © 2019 by Peter Cameron
All rights reserved
First Soft Skull edition: February 2007
Part of this book was originally published in New England Review.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Nunez, Sigrid, author.
Title: Mitz : the marmoset of Bloomsbury / Sigrid Nunez ; with an afterword by Peter Cameron.
Description: New York : Soft Skull, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019012779 | ISBN 9781593765828 (softcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Woolf, Leonard, 1880–1969—Fiction. | Woolf, Virginia, 1882–1941—Fiction. | Pet owners—Fiction. | Mitz (Monkey)—Fiction. | Marmosets—Fiction. | Human-animal relationships—Fiction. | Bloomsbury (London,