Links, reviews, etc. - Week ending 6 December 2008

Amazon.com began listing Sylvia Plath's Fiction: A Critical Study by Luke Ferretter (University of Edinburgh Press). Amazon.com lists the publication date to be on May 15, 2009. Edinburgh University Press lists publication date to be July 2009. Regardless, look for it. Based on what I know of Ferretter's work, and what I've read & heard, I think it is safe for me to give advanced, unseen praise for this book.

The product description on Amazon.com reads:

Sylvia Plath's poetry has generated tons of critical interest, yet there remains no full-length study of her fiction. In addition to her classic novel The Bell Jar, Plath wrote dozens of short stories, only about half of which have been published. Luke Ferretter launches the first comprehensive study of Plath as a writer of fiction. He encompasses both published and unpublished material, tracing Plath's influences, style, politics, and place in the history of postmodern fiction. Plath was very much concerned with gender ideologies of the 1950s, and Ferretter reads Plath's work against this cultural context. Building on recent studies of her multigeneric work, Ferretter defines a clear and comprehensive place for Plath's fiction in her richly complex body of work.

Key features:
• First full-length study of Plath's fiction
• Comprehensive discussion of Plath's unpublished short fiction
• Extensive discussion of Plath's short fiction as a whole.

This is a very worthy and welcome subject, and Ferretter's book will undoubtedly bring much needed and wider recognition to Plath's fiction.

Lisa Jones interviews Kate Moses (author of Wintering) before Kate's recent talk on Plath at the University of the Pacific.

Ebay and Bloomsbury will have a live auction on 11 December for a first edition The Colossus by Sylvia Plath (Heinemann, 1960). Quite a rare book, and typically expensive, it might be possible to snatch this up at a bargain.

I've added a couple of new book covers to my website A celebration, this is. These are for Johnny Panik ve ruyalarin kutsal kitabi (a Turkish tranlastion of Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams) and a recent critical work, Sylvia Plath's Lyrical Responses to Works of Art: A Portrait of the Artist(s) by Doris Kraler-Bergmann. The Turkish book cover, in particular, is haunting and striking.
Coming next week: A review of Jo Gill's recently published Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath.

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...

Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

The following news story appeared online this morning: HEPTONSTALL, ENGLAND (APFS) - The small village of Heptonstall is once again in the news because of the grave site of American poet Sylvia Plath. The headstone controversy rose to a fever pitch in 1989 when Plath's grave was left unmarked for a long period of time after vandals repeatedly chiseled her married surname Hughes off the stone marker. Author Nick Hornby commented, "I like Plath, but the controversy reaching its fever pitch in the 80s had nothing to do with my book title choice." Today, however, it was discovered that the grave was defaced but in quite an unlikely fashion. This time, Plath's headstone has had slashed-off her maiden name "Plath," so the stone now reads "Sylvia Hughes." A statement posted on Twitter from @masculinistsfortedhughes (Masculinists for Ted Hughes) has claimed responsibility saying that, "We did this because as Ted Hughes' first wife, Sylvia de...

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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