Little Fugue, by Robert Anderson. Ballantine, 384 pages, $24.95.
Edgar Allan Poe wrote that the death of a beautiful woman “is the most poetical topic in the world.” There could hardly be a less wholesome assertion in American criticism (unless it’s Camille Paglia’s assertion that children are sexy), but it’s true that the profound Read More
Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement, by Sylvia Plath, with an introduction by Frieda Hughes. HarperCollins, 211 pages, $24.95.
On the morning of Feb. 11, 1963, in the alleyway behind 23 Fitzroy Road in snowbound London, Myra Norris, a Health Services nurse who was scheduled Read More
Christine Jeffs’ Sylvia , from a screenplay by John Brownlow, has been criticized for not being completely faithful to the known facts of the ill-fated love and marriage of Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) and Ted Hughes (1930-1998). But what there is onscreen, faithful or not, offers a wondrously illuminating artistic experience for its ideal audience-people like Read More
Heaven knows what possessed the Muses to come down from Mount Olympus and, as they went about their business of inspiring great art, to put on–as their business attire–the bodies of human beings. Ever since the Renaissance, when we first noticed their presence among us, we’ve seen the nine goddesses reincarnated as a series of Read More
Notes toward enjoying Peter Brook’s misunderstood new version of Hamlet , currently at the Brooklyn Academy of Music:
It is a landmark production of the most hackneyed great play in history precisely because it compels us to see it with utterly fresh eyes. The fine Polish critic Jan Kott–an influence on Brook’s early work–wrote memorably Read More
In the early morning hours of Feb. 11, 1963, as much of the serious reading public now knows, Sylvia Plath committed suicide at the age of 30 by gassing herself in the kitchen of her London flat. She had struggled with manic-depression since she was a teenager and had recently sunk into a life-threatening depression Read More
