Durga Chew-Bose

Too Much and Not the Mood

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One of Vulture's “25 of the Most Exciting Book Releases for 2017”
One of Nylon's “50 Books We Can't Wait To Read In 2017”
An entirely original portrait of a young writer shutting out the din in order to find her own voice
On April 11, 1931, Virginia Woolf ended her entry in A Writer’s Diary with the words “too much and not the mood.” She was describing how tired she was of correcting her own writing, of the “cramming in and the cutting out” to please other readers, wondering if she had anything at all that was truly worth saying.
The character of that sentiment, the attitude of it, inspired Durga Chew-Bose to write and collect her own work. The result is a lyrical and piercingly insightful collection of essays and her own brand of essay-meets-prose poetry about identity and culture. Inspired by Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Lydia Davis’s short prose, and Vivian Gornick’s exploration of interior life, Chew-Bose captures the inner restlessness that keeps her always on the brink of creative expression.
Too Much and Not the Mood is a beautiful and surprising exploration of what it means to be a first-generation, creative young woman working today.
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194 printed pages
Original publication
2017
Publication year
2017
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Quotes

  • b0767492440has quoted3 years ago
    muffling my Wow. I sensed all over my body the jolt of something unanticipated happening to me; of someone else’s impulse pressed against my lips. How even the most innocent acts swarm with pleasure because our nerve endings, thank goodness, never mature. Never mellow. They remain prone-to. Tendrils that keep us—in the best way—shatterable. Wasn’t it lovely, I thought, to be caught off guard by the boy whose every mannerism I’d crystallized? Who I never anticipated was considering me
  • theseatheseahas quoted2 years ago
    His “sad, lustrous, and doglike eyes,” Lynne Tillman wrote in her 1992 Sight and Sound essay, “Kiss of Death,” describing his performance as “Mikey” Corleone before he transforms into Michael Corleone, when he can still promise Diane Keaton, “That’s my family, Kay. It’s not me.” Those young Pacino eyes capsize me. His battery of protean gestures is absorbing. Young Al Pacino makes me giddy. I sink into my chair. I experience the full-blown, bodily preoccupation of having a crush. Watching him is like discovering a long-lost audition tape, because his delivery, then, was intimate, kept, mild. I cover my face. I even once, not long ago, ducked under my desk while watching a scene from The Panic in Needle Park, before Bobby and Helen—played with disconsolate, plain beauty by Kitty Winn—spiral downward together and before Helen is using, when they’re just getting to know each other, actually.
  • theseatheseahas quoted2 years ago
    the space bar’s lost its spring. Or how a cover of a familiar song usually forces further consideration before I can identify it. How, all at once, what I know for sure—the words to a damn song—can feel frustratingly just out of reach.

On the bookshelves

  • Катерина Чацкая
    Essays
    • 10
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