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Showing posts from August, 2019

An Additional Article Relating to Sylvia Plath from August 1953

Yes is the answer. I am still searching for Sylvia Plath. This year, so far, has felt slow for finding new articles on Plath's August 1953 disappearance and suicide attempt but there is one new one to report. It is "Missing Girl Found Asleep in Home" from page 1 of the Buffalo Evening News on 26 August 1953. It joins another Buffalonian article previously found from the 27th in the Buffalo Courier Express . The article is on the First Suicide Attempt page of A celebration, this is , as well as a transcription of the text which reads much the same as all the others on this aspect of Plath's disappearance. All links accessed 4 August 2019.

Sylvia Plath In Context: Essays edited by Tracy Brain

Published today by the Cambridge University Press is Sylvia Plath In Context , edited by Tracy Brain ( Amazon.co.uk ). From the book blurb on CUP's website: Sylvia Plath in Context brings together an exciting combination of established and emerging thinkers from a range of disciplines. The book reveals Plath's responses to the writers she reads, her interventions in the literary techniques and forms she encounters, and the wide range of cultural, personal, artistic, political, historical and geographical influences that shaped her work. Many of these essays confront the specific challenges for reading Sylvia Plath today. Others evaluate her legacy to the writers who followed her. Reaching well beyond any simple equation in which biographical cause results in literary effect, all of them argue for a body of work that emerges from Plath's deep involvement in the world she inhabits. Situating Plath's writing within a wide frame of references that reach beyond any si...

Update on The Selected Writings of Assia Wevill

Recently I received a comment on The Selected Writings of Assia Wevill book announcement post   asking for an update on the book that I am fortunate enough to be co-editing with Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick, author of the forthcoming Reclaiming Assia Wevill: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Literary Imagination ( LSU Press ). Julie and I are happy to provide this, however briefly. We have compiled the first draft of the manuscript which consists of four parts: Letters, Journals, Poems, and Miscellaneous texts. All sections have been annotated with contextual footnotes. In addition, we are presently working on our introduction and the selection of images and illustrations. In the coming months we'll continue read and proof the text, try to add more information to the footnotes if we can, and try to locate more documents to include. This autumn I am going to work on building an index, because I enjoy punishing myself in nerdtastic ways. Happily, we are on schedule to have the ...

Sylvia Plath's fireflies

Sylvia Plath's first published poem appeared on 10 August 1941, seventy-eight years ago today. It appeared on the "Good Sport" page of the Boston Herald , page 8. The printed poem is brief: just four lines. The subject of the poem is what the young poet heard and saw in summer evenings: crickets and fireflies which "Twinkle as they pass." I am presenting KICKING myself because this should have been in Volume 1 of The Letters of Sylvia Plath . I am seriously the most rubbish editor ever. See this blog post for more information on the poem and the letter. All links accessed 4 August 2019.

Faber reissues Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar

On 26 July 2019, Faber and Faber tweeted out a lovely photograph featuring a person holding a copy of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath seated on some grass. 'It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York . . .' Our gorgeous new paperback of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, with cover artwork inspired by Faber's 1966 edition, is out now. pic.twitter.com/pJ77K14N9a — Faber & Faber (@FaberBooks) July 26, 2019 And then today, they tweeted out that the novel is officially reissued. However, I have not seen the book listed either on their website or on Amazon.co.uk, but it is a beautiful looking cover which pays homage to their original 1966 edition. A gallery of historical  Bell Jar  covers  can be seen over on my website. All links accessed 30 July 2019 and 1 August 2019.