Reading Dates for Carl Rollyson's American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath

Happy New Year.

Did you miss me as much as I missed you?

Carl Rollyson, author of the forthcoming biography American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath (St. Martin's Press, 2013), will be reading from his book in various US cities. The list so far includes: (updated 16 January 2013)

January 25, 2013: 92nd Street Y, Tribeca Lecture Hall, New York, New York: 12 Noon

February 6: Left Bank Books, St. Louis, Missouri

February 15: Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, Massachusetts

February 28: The Athenaeum of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

March 21: A Room of One's Own, Madison, Wisconsin

March 26: Boulder Book Store, Boulder, Colorado

March 27: Tattered Cover, Denver, Colorado

As it is winter, please check with book stores to verify dates and times as weather related delays are always a possibility. I plan to attend the Cambridge, Mass. reading. I will plan on 1 February and 1 March to re-post this information with new dates added if there are any. Should any events in January crop up, I will endeavor to give as much notice as I can.

American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath has had four early reviews in Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Publisher's Weekly, and Library Journal. Expect more reviews around the official publication date of 29 January 2013. The book will be available in a Kindle edition, as well as in regular hardback by You can watch a promotional trailer for the book here on YouTube.

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

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 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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