Surprise!  Well, it was to us. For ages the listing on Amazon.com said that my book co-written with Gail Crowther, These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath (Fonthill) was to be published on 3 October. I was checking something else on Amazon yesterday and discovered that the book was actually released on either 5 June or 19 June (it's unclear). But, be that as it may, what matter is that the book is being issued in the US now directly from Amazon and possibly other booksellers. You can also find it on Book Depository . These Ghostly Archives  would  make Great 4th of July presents. All links accessed 26 June 2017.

Back in the infancy of this blog, I posted on the Gordon Ames Lameyer mss  at the Lilly Library, Indiana University at Bloomington. Since that time in June 2007, I have made several trips back to the Lilly to re-work with the materials. Each archival visit brings a different focus, a different level of importance, and a different and changing meaning and understanding of the materials contained in each library, box, and folder. In March of 2015, I spent four days at the Lilly doing intense research on for the Letters of Sylvia Plath . As is usually, I called for the Lameyer mss to look at the original letters, and as well to look again at the amazingly vibrant slides and photographs held in the collection. That got me started thinking about the possibility of dating them, to better understand some of the times that Plath spent with Lameyer in various locations in Massachusetts, as well as Paris, Venice , and Rome. The finding aid indicates that there are 21 slides plus additiona...

The following is a catalog of the items in Sylvia Plath's Smith College scrapbook held by the Lilly Library in Plath mss II, Oversize 8. As with Plath's high school scrapbook , it is heavily annotated with the memorabilia from her college years. The items here date almost exclusively from the fall of 1951 through early summer 1955, from Plath's sophomore year at Smith College through to her graduation from Smith College and preparation to leave for England on her Fulbright scholarship. As with the high school scrapbook, the information here was obtained from 16-19 March 2015 on a research visit I made to the Lilly Library. The contents reflect what I saw and photographed at that time. Upon analyzing each page image, it was determined that several of the now loose items were found to be in the wrong folder and/or with the wrong page. So some items will appear in the list below with annotations about where it was photographed and where it should be belong. I used the same...

Well...so while I was away on holiday, news broke by Danuta Kean of the Guardian in her article " Unseen Sylvia Plath Poems Deciphered in Carbon Paper " and the report seems to have swept through social media. The story discusses something Gail and I wrote about in our recently published book These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath . While we discuss the finding of two lost Sylvia Plath poems ("Megrims" and "To A Refractory Santa Claus") in the book, some of the "information" in the articles that followed Danuta's was so misleading that it warrants some comment here. First of all: the book, on Sylvia Plath and not just The Bell Jar , is already out and can be purchased through Amazon.co.uk and Book Depository (free international shipping). It will officially be published in the United States in October but do not let this deter you from buying it now. Second of all: the poems are not published in the book, though they ...