List $18.00

Written by Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963) - Audio book performed by Francis McDormand - Abridged Fiction - Abridgment approved by Sylvia Plath's estate - 2 CASSETTES - 3 hours

Publisher, Harper/Caedmon Audio (January 1997)

"A fine novel, as bitter and remorseless as her last poems -- the kind of book Salinger's Fanny might have written about herself ten years later, if she had spent those ten years in Hell." --Robert Scholes, The New York Times Book Review

"By turns funny, harrowing, crude, ardent and artless. Its most notable quality is an astonishing immediacy, like a series of snapshots taken at high noon." --Time

"A special poignance... a special force, a humbling power, because it shows the vulnerability of people of hope and good will." --Newsweek.

The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature, with more than 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 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.

About the Author: Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) has been acclaimed as a figure of major importance in American poetry. Her work includes the volumes Arid, Water, and Winter Trees. Her Collected Poems were awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1981.

About the Performer: Frances McDormand won the 1997 Oscar® for Best Actress for her role in Fargo, having previously been both a Tony® and Oscar® nominee; she has also starred in numerous films, among them Short Cuts, Madeline and Raising Arizona.