Links, reviews, etc. - Week ending 8 November 2008

In an interview, Ireland's Nick Laird, mentions Plath's "Tulips". Laird will be giving at reading at Boston University on 8 November 2008, at 5:30 p.m. at CGS's Jacob Sleeper Auditorium, Room 129, 871 Commonwealth Avenue.

The October/November2008 issue of Rare Book Review features an article on Sebastian Carter of the Rampant Lions Press. The Rampant Lions Press - in conjunction with the Rainbow Press - printed a number of limited editions of Plath's work. These titles include Lyonnesse, Pursuit, and Dialogue Over a Ouija Board. Copies are fairly expensive, but very lovely too. If these are beyond your means, libraries throughout the world do hold these titles in their special collections.

The Daily Mail ran the first article of a four-part series on Frieda Hughes on 5 November. Read it here!

Michael Dirda reviews Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell in The Washington Post. There are bound to be some Plath-references in this important new book.

Events
From 14-16 November, at Hynes Convention Center in Boston, Mass., the 32nd Annual Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair will take place. This is a wonderful opportunity to see and buy rare and antiquarian books. Many dealers bring their Plath items, not just because they know I'll be there, but for you, too! Now's the time to start or build to your collection.

There are a couple of new books out there worth mentioning.

Published in October 2008
The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath by Jo Gill Cambridge University Press - $70.00 (hardcover)/$19.99 (paperback) This title is forthcoming for the Amazon Kindle ebook reader device.

Sylvia Plath's Lyrical Responses to Works of Art: A Portrait of the Artist(s) by Doris Kraler-Bergmann
VDM Verlag - $67.28 (paperback)

Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar and Poems (Writers and Their Works) by Raychel Haugrud Reiff
Marshall Cavendish Children's Books - $42.79

Forthcoming publications

Available December 23, 2008
Your Own, Sylvia: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath by Stephanie Hemphill Knopf Books for Young Readers - $7.99 (paperback)

Available April 21, 2009
Sylvia Plath: A Biography by Connie Ann Kirk
Prometheus Books - $16.98 (paperback)

Available in 2009
Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar by Harold Bloom
Bloom's Literary Criticism - Price unknown

Comments

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove...

Some final photographs of Sylvia Plath

Susan O'Neill-Roe took a series of photographs of Sylvia Plath and her children from October to late November (or maybe early December) 1962 while she was a day nanny/mother's help at Court Green. From nearby Belstone , it was a short drive to North Tawton and the aid she provided enabled Plath to complete the masterful October and November poems and also to make day or overnight trips to London for poetry business and other business. Some of O'Neill-Roe's photographs are well-known. However, a cache of photographs formed a part of the papers of failed biographer Harriet Rosenstein. They were sold separately from the rest of her papers that went to Emory. I was fortunate enough to see low resolution scans of them a while back so please note these are being posted today as mere reference quality images. There are two series here. The first of the children with Plath dressed in red and black. (This should be referred to in the future, please, as Plath's Stendhal-c...

Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last...

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