Sylvia Plath Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Bell Jar (1961)

Collections

  1. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (2008)

Novellas

  1. Mary Ventura & the Ninth Kingdom (2019)

Anthologies edited

Non fiction

  1. The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume II (2018)
  2. The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume I (2019)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Novellas Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Sylvia Plath Books Overview

The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature, with over two million copies sold in this country. This extraordinary work chronicles the crackup of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time. Step by careful step, Sylvia Plath takes us with Esther through a painful month in New York as a contest winning junior editor on a magazine, her increasingly strained relationships with her mother, and with the boy she dated in college, and eventually, devastatingly, into the madness itself. The reader is drawn into her breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is rare in any novel. It points to the fact that The Bell Jar is a largely autobiographical work about Plath’s own summer of 1953, when she was a guest editor at Mademoiselle and went through a breakdown. It reveals so much about the sources of Sylvia Plath’s own tragedy that its publication was considered a landmark in literature. ‘Esther Greenwood’s account of her years in The Bell Jar is as clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing…
This is not a potboiler, nor a series of ungrateful caricatures; it is literature.’ New York Times This special 25th anniversary edition includes a new foreword by Frances McCullough,who was the Harper & Row editor for the original edition, about the untold story of The Bell Jar‘s first American publication.

Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams

‘What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination…
. If I sit still and don’t do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine.’ Sylvia Plath, from Notebooks, February 1956Renowned for her poetry, Sylvia Plath was also a brilliant writer of prose. This collection of short stories, essays, and diary excerpts highlights her fierce concentration on craft, the vitality of her intelligence, and the yearnings of her imaginaton. Featuring an introduction by Plath’s husband, the late British poet Ted Hughes, these writings also reflect themes and images she would fully realize in her poetry. Jonny Panic and the Bible of Dreams truly showcases the talent and genius of Sylvia Plath.

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