The distance from Corby, England to Boston,Massachusetts is 3226.58 miles. My copy of Heather Clark’s The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes was mailed from Corby. Thanks to atrocious weather and US postal inspections/security measures, it took 49 days for the copy to reach me. This distance, 3226.58 miles, is roughly the same distance as from Frontera Comalapa, Chiapas, Mexico to Boston, which Google Maps tells me I can walk in 43 days, 19 hours via the Natchez Trace Parkway. The moral of the story is if you want something from England, it would be faster to fly over there yourself and buy it... I hope to have a review of this much anticipated book in February...

Anywhere you read Sylvia Plath is a great place. One of the best new ways to read Sylvia Plath is on an electronic device. I am dedicated ardently to the printed book, but there are some times when electronic texts simply present themselves as a better alternative. How many times are you out at a coffee shop, on the train or bus, perhaps away from your books at party and the need to read Plath or look something up - a line, a phrase - comes upon you? The Amazon Kindle is one such device that answers these problems. I neither own nor want to own the actual reader, but with the free Smart Phone app and a free Kindle for PC app , too, there is almost no need for the Kindle reader. I highly recommend downloading either the app for your phone or your PC and buying the eBooks that are available in your region or country. With full text search capability, it makes reading and finding a specific passage so much easier. In the US, you have the ability to purchase the following books by or about...

I recently found two additional publications we can look forward to this year. 1.) Badia, Janet. Sylvia Plath and the Mythology of Women Readers . Amherst: Univ Of Massachusetts Pr, 2011. from the UMass Press New Books Spring/Summer 2011 catalog: Depicted in popular films, television series, novels, poems, and countless media reports, Sylvia Plath’s women readers have become nearly as legendary as Plath herself, in large part because the depictions are seldom kind. If one is to believe the narrative told by literary and popular culture, Plath’s primary audience is a body of young, misguided women who uncritically —even pathologically— consume Plath’s writing with no awareness of how they harm the author’s reputation in the process. Janet Badia investigates the evolution of this narrative, tracing its origins, exposing the gaps an delisions that have defined it, and identifying it as a bullying mythology whose roots lie in a long history of ungenerous, if not outright misogynistic, rhet...

As I do, I recently checked for more articles on Sylvia Plath's first suicide attempt in August 1953. The timing was right and there were a few additional articles. To quote Blur, "Woohoo!" The first is from the Miami Daily News from August 26, 1953. The article title is "Student Missing." It appeared on page one and included Plath's photograph. The second and third articles appeared in the Meriden Record (Connecticut). On the August 26, 1953 edition, on page 10, readers read about how a "Brilliant College Girl Disappears." Very dramatic. The following day, the Meriden Record ran "Missing Senior Found Under Porch" on the front page. This article is not yet linked. I'm ahead of Google! However, let this not deter you from finding and reading the article for yourself. If you click "Browse this newspaper," then "View All" under 1953, then scroll to August 27, click it and then mouse down to the bottom right...

Last summer I found this interesting website called Book Drum . On it, people more or less bring the books to life through annotations. Naturally when I saw The Bell Jar was included , my interest was piqued. This would have been a dream project for me to do but now that its done, and done well by Siân Cleaver, I can move on to something else I suppose. The Bookmarks section is the meatiest, in which Cleaver explores and illustrates many of the commercial aspects and non-fiction events, people, places, etc. that Plath wove like a tapestry in the novel. The entire site is informative and I hope you enjoy Cleaver's work. My particular favorite is the YouTube video of Art Ford (the inspiration for Lenny Shepherd). I meant all fall to post this link but with "Last Letter" and other posts and the end of the year, this one kept getting bumped. However, with the below information to present to you too, I am almost glad that it did! In addition to this website, I recently found...

This may or may not be of interest to anyone but me, but I thought I would post some metrics for the calendar year 2010 for this blog and my Plath website. The country and city stats show just how far reaching interest in Plath is. The keyword stats show how powerful search engines really are. Visitors to the Sylvia Plath Info Blog came from 132 countries/territories. The top countries were USA, UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, Sweden, France, India, Italy and Macedonia. The top cities were London, Sydney, New York, Seattle, Hagersten, Berlin, Chicago, Cambridge (Eng), Atlanta, and Adelaide. There were 10,358 keywords typed into search engines that brought people to the site. The top keyword searches were: "plath info blog", "sylvia plath blog", "sylvia plath info", "plath blog", "sylvia plath blogspot", "plath flur", "did sylvia plath have an affair with a man named ralph?", "sylvia plath", "plat...

Dusting off the keyboard, oiling the finger joints, etc. Creaking back to life. One of my few resolutions is to finish adding the books Plath read/owned to her library on LibraryThing. Like a bibliography it is never going to be complete for there are undoubtedly unmentioned books that she read. This morning I added about twenty titles, mostly from late 1956 and early 1957 from her time at Newnham College in Cambridge. These are all titles that she listed in Works Cited or Bibliographies for papers; or titles that she marked on reading lists or syllabi. Of the 25 pages of notes I took on Plath's courses and papers and reading lists, etc. there is about a page and a half remaining to be added... In December, shortly after my last post, I found out that a writer called Carl Rollyson is at work on a new biography of Sylvia Plath provisionally titled American Isis: The Life and Death of Sylvia Plath and expected to be published in February 2013. You can read about it here .