An enchanted house

Virginia Woolf's most famous collection of stories in a new translation. To take a breather between working on her novels, Virginia Woolf wrote short stories. She would sketch sudden inspirations, fleeting encounters, "all sorts of colorful picked-up stuff," as she called it, with the intention of eventually developing these drafts for mental relaxation. In the stories, Virginia Woolf's mastery is evident in her ability to use seemingly trivial details, "the accidental, the lost in the course of a life that expresses the speed of life," to sink deeper and deeper into the layers of the human unconscious in a free play of associations, "away from the surface with its hard, separate facts," where perspectives linger against the "relentless wear and tear" of life.