The Edward Gorey House Book Club: Pride Month

Each month, Books, Please! The Edward Gorey House Book Club meets — at the House and in an online setting — to discuss some of Gorey’s favorite authors and his literary influences. This year’s Books, Please!‍ Pride Month pick is Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a love letter formatted as a fictional accounting of English literary history through the perspective of an ageless genderfluid poet. Yes; it is all that, and more.

A powerful modernist novel about gender (or possibly about something else entirely), Orlando chronicles the life of an ageless young man who, about halfway through the book, wakes up as a woman. Is it a piece of experimental historiography? Is it an ode to the literary history of England? Is it a strange, extended love letter to Vita Sackville-West? Is it any good at all? Find all this out and more on June 24th.

Please note that this book contains racist imagery, some of a graphic nature. Read with caution.