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Showing posts from September, 2013

Sylvia Plath Autumn Publications

Faber & Faber recently announced a new branding , going officially from Faber and Faber to Faber & Faber. If you collect Sylvia Plath books, this might add a new look to the spines of your collection. Faber are re-releasing/re-publishing several Sylvia Plath books this fall and in the early part of 2014. Time will tell if the new branding is on any of these titles. But, here is what we can look forward to in the near future. Published earlier this month was Sylvia Plath: Drawings , with an introduction by Plath's daughter Frieda Hughes. Also published in paperback is the Carol Ann Duffy selection of Sylvia Plath Poems . Published on 7 November 2013: The Bell Jar , Ariel , and The Journals of Sylvia Plath . For Ariel and The Bell Jar , Faber's gone retro and into their archive, choosing cover designs that match some of the editions published in the 1960s and 1970s. For a (complete?) archive of their covers, please go see the books pages on my website for Sylvia

Updates to A celebration, this is (sylviaplath.info)

Earlier this week I updated the layout of the thumbnail pages for several of the book cover galleries on A celebration, this is , my website for who? ...Sylvia Plath (aka sylviaplath.info). The galleries I updated are the poetry books , prose books , and periodical covers . For these pages, the title and other bibliographic information have been taken from kind of being hidden (you had to hover over the thumbnail image to see it) and placed it directly below the thumbnail. I hope this helps to explain what it is you are viewing. You can still click on the thumbnail to see the bigger cover image, but you loose the data about the book. So, you'll have to remember what you clicked... The other cover galleries ( Limited editions ; Books, Criticisms, Memoirs, etc. ; and Translations ) remain mostly the same. In order to see any relevant title or bibliographic information you will need to simply hover your mouse pointer over the thumbnail to see it.

Sylvia Plath in Recent Fiction

In the last year, two fictional books about Sylvia Plath have appeared. In 2012, Alice Walsh's Analyzing Sylvia Plath (Thomas & Mercer) was published and this year saw Scott Evans' Sylvia's Secret (Port Yonder Press). In January of this year, also, Plath was the subject of "The Speech Therapist" a short story by Cyril Dabydeen published in the January-February 2013 issue of World Literature Today (Vol 87, Issue 1, pages 20-26). You can read a fairly good synopsis of Alice Walsh's book on Amazon.com (linked above), but my take away from it was that Canada is a nice-safe-friendly place and that New York is really dangerous and a lot of people are untrustworthy and have guns and it is scary. #Fail. The Evans book is described as "a fast-paced psychological thriller... based on several years of research..." that explores, in part, "the actual circumstances of [Sylvia Plath's] death." The blurb on Port Yonder Press' webpage i

Sylvia Plath: Drawings Published Today

Published today by Faber & Faber in England is Sylvia Plath: Drawings , edited and introduced by Frieda Hughes. The book is 72 pages and is on sale via Faber's website (and Amazon.co.uk ) for £16.99. The ISBN for the book is 978-0-571-29521-0. The book features an introduction by Frieda Hughes and also publishes for the first time ever (well, the second time ever since it first appeared in The Times Magazine on 24 August 2013) a letter from Sylvia Plath to her husband Ted Hughes written in early October 1956. The book reprints two letters from Plath to her mother, as well, from 25 August 1956 and 21 October 1956 and a journal entry from 21 August 1957. These all serve as contextual devices for the drawings. The book is divided into several sections (as seen from the proof, there might have been changes between then and now): Drawings from England; Drawings from France; Drawings from Spain; and Drawings from the USA; as well as including a short biography (chronology) an

Sylvia Plath Event: Karen V. Kukil on The Bell Jar at 50

Associate Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections at Smith College and editor The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath , Karen V. Kukil, will present a lecture on Sylvia Plath titled The Bell Jar at 50 on Thursday 5 September 2013 at 4 PM in the Browsing Room of the Neilson Library, Smith College. All are welcome. The lecture is free and will certainly enrich one's understanding of the process of creating The Bell Jar and its publication history. While you are there, you should also check out some of the exhibits ( "From Petals to Paper" and " The Bell Jar at 50"  and "Sylvia Plath Reads the Wife of Bath" ) that are closing at the end of the week (8 September), too.