Links, reviews, etc. - Week ending 27 June 2009

Here are some links to interesting stories that have run in the last week or so.

Philip Stone and Katie Allen at The Bookseller reports "BBC Season Lifts Poetry Sales" on 26 June. Plath book sales are up by 5,000 copies (or 92%) after the BBC's "Wuthering Heights" which aired on 12 May.
Ben Myers at The Guardian blogs, "The Spirit of Hughes and Plath is Alive in West Yorkshire" on 23 June.
Rosita Bolad of the Irish Times reports "A Poet Clears His Shelves" on 20 June. Maggs of London is offering for sale the books from Richard Murphy's library. Among the many books are several Plath items...
Liat Elkayam's review "They Came to Praise Assia" appeared in Haaretz on 18 June 2009. A review of Eilat Negev and Yehuda Koren's biography of Assia Wevill, recently translated into Hebrew. The book's title is Hayeha U'mota shel Assia G.: Hatzela Hayisraelit ben Ted Hughes LeSylvia Plath, or The Life and Death of Assia G.: The Israeli Shadow Between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. The title, "The Life and Death of Assia G." comes from a poem by Yehuda Amichai. You can view the beautiful cover under the Hebrew books on my website for Sylvia Plath. And while you're there, please notice an abundance of new book covers of books by and about Sylvia Plath in many different languages.
Plath Profiles 2 is in production. We are aiming for an early August 2009 publication date. Thanks to those who submitted and to those awaiting its arrival patiently!

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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