The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath.
Plath was an excellent poet but is known to many for this largely autobiographical novel. The Bell Jar tells the story of a gifted young woman's mental breakdown beginning during a summer internship as a junior editor at a magazine in New York City in the early 1950s. The real Plath committed suicide in 1963 and left behind this scathingly sad, honest and perfectly-written book, which remains one of the best-told tales of a woman's descent into insanity.
|
The Collected Poems
by Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes (Designer).
Sylvia Plath died in 1963, and even now her outsize persona threatens to bury her poetry--the numerous biographies and studies often drawing the reader toward anecdote and away from the work. It's a relief to turn to the poems themselves and once more be jolted by their strange beauty, hard-wrought originality, and acetylene anger. "It is a heart, / This holocaust I walk in, / O golden child the world will kill and eat." While the juvenilia and poems written before 1960 that Ted Hughes has included here prefigure Plath's later obsessions, they also enable us to witness her turn from thesaurus-heavy verse to stripped-down art as they gather power through raw simplicity.
|
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
by Sylvia Plath, Karen V. Kukil (Editor).
Plath kept a journal for most of her sadly shortened life, recording every nuance of feeling and thought with wit, passion, and despair, singlemindedly pursuing literary mastery. Her late husband, the poet Ted Hughes, began preparing Plath's journals, excepting those he destroyed after her suicide, for unexpurgated publication, a project now brought to fruition in a volume that enables readers to immerse themselves in Plath's gorgeous, ever-turbulent inner sea.
|
|
More Sylvia Plath
|