Links for Today

Links for today: we've got Emily Perkins' Novel About My Wife racking up great reviews in The Guardian and in The Toronto Star. (Read my review, and interview. An aside: very exciting, my copy of Perkins' first book Not Her Real Name arrived in the post today.) Somewhat dissimilarly bookish, how to make a hardback into a handbag (via The Pop Triad) and I'm going to do it! Baby Got Books celebrates the death of the death of online criticism. Mrs. Dalloway Digested is funny. Hilary Mantel remembers 30 years of Virago. Lizzie Skurnick rereads The Girl with the Silver Eyes.

And one of the many highlights of my weekend was reading the actual printed Guardian Review, particularly Zadie Smith on Middlemarch. Citing Henry James' 1873 review: "It sets a limit," he wrote, "to the development of the old-fashioned English novel." Writes Smith, "It's strange to see wise Henry reading like a dogmatic young man, with a young man's certainty of what elements, in our lives, will prove the most significant."