Durga Chew-Bose found the title for her debut collection of essays, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017), in a 1931 Virginia Woolf diary entry. Woolf was frustrated with a certain pressure she felt to pander to her readers, and wondered if there was any point in writing at all. Whether intentionally or not, Chew-Bose’s work responds to this question with an emphatic “yes.” She writes about everything from her name to the tortured practice of writing itself, which she likens to a “closed pistachio shell.” She’s perfected the art of the celebrity profile, from Kristen Stewart to Rihanna. As managing editor of SSENSE, she’s made the e-commerce site a wellspring of cultural criticism: in one series, Fiction Dispatch, she has an author select an item on the site worth under 500 dollars and then pen an under-500-word piece of bite-sized storytelling around it. Chew-Bose once said that her writing starts in one place, goes to seven or so others, and then returns to its original point. That’s how the best prose works — it momentarily pulls us out from the mundanity of our everyday lives only to drop us back in with new eyes.