“On Browsing in Bookstores, a Pastime” by M. G. Turner

/0 Comments/in , , , , , , /by

There is something uniquely magical about walking inside a bookstore, preparing to browse: you cross the threshold and suddenly you have been transported, quite literally, to a world of books. As the atmosphere settles, you notice there is a quiet here that reigns supreme, a quiet comparable perhaps only to that of a library; a pregnant hush fills the air and instills a state of calm that you would be unlikely to find elsewhere. Especially in New York City where the aggressive frenzy of life never ceases, the bookstore—and its ill-treated cousin, the library—can be an oasis, a place of refuge, a second home that can be utilized when other options of play or fun or drink have been depleted or appear uninviting.

When times are tough the world of books calls to us, and if we’re lucky we heed that call—the call of what we must do and not what we ought to. There is no greater pleasure than going to a bookstore with an objective in mind, say to purchase some work or other by Balzac and leaving inexplicably with a Faulkner. Bookstores divert our expectations. The shelves in many of New York’s finest are crammed high to the ceiling with both old and new tomes that at first speak to us in voices we may only hear subliminally. Thus visuals are our calling card, our way in. Often it is the seductive glint of a spine or the flicker of a cover that catches our eye, and as we pull the book off the shelf, and stare at it, a love affair begins. The eye tries to comprehend what the soul sees clearer. We know there is some future here for us, our paths will diverge together, we will save that spark and let it grow—that is, if we are lucky and decide not to put whatever work we have found back on the shelf where it will be consigned to wait a while longer for the coming of its true owner.

But if we hold in our hands the book we are meant to read, then we are giving ourselves over to something unconscious and in some ways very powerful. What we are giving ourselves over to is Fate. For reading books, and at the outset, buying books, is very much like making friends. The object itself transcends the lucid boundaries of paper and ink; it is so much more, and because of that the weight of a decision rests heavily on our shoulders. Do you buy another Nabokov? No, you’ve already read four of him. Another Tolstoy? You haven’t even finished Anna Karenina. A new edition of Ulysses? You have two already, dog-eared and disgruntled and waiting to be finished. You walk on aimlessly, through the aisles, dodging people taking on a similar pursuit: beautiful girls in faded jean jackets and sunglasses on their foreheads, old men stooping over dangerously to get a look at some old and beaten Melville, and the others like yourself trying to work themselves up into a state of rapt determination, studying the walls, trying to discern the titles of famous works, squinting as if at the hieroglyphics of Luxor.

The weight of a book in hand is equivalent to the weight of gold. You measure it, test it, consider whether you can withstand the flurry of its pages, the emotional impact of its premise. Stories are contained within stories, characters within characters, subtlety gives way to novelty, novelty to extremity, enjoyment to a cessation of pain. For that is what all the browsers, including yourself are looking for: a place to stop and sit awhile, to direct thought consciously toward a more righteous purpose, feeding the imagination a meal it cannot make on its own.

The shelves are calling to you. You know not to make a mistake. Occasionally you do make one and you are back at the register the next day making the same hurried, nervous claim: “I bought this for my friend but it turns out he already had it.” Several Hemingways have found their way back to this bardo. Tolstoy’s What is Art? was too polemical for your taste. A copy of the Master and Margherita whose translation you utterly hated was happily parted with. Silently, the cashier, gives you store credit and with this slip, handed over with a subdued frown—half-judgement, half-dismay—you are now able to go back to the walls, back to the drawing board as it were, to feast your eyes over the multitude of possibilities, the bold, broad scope of world literature staring you so determinedly in the face.

And finally you find what you’re looking for. And that pain does cease. Until of course you finish the book at a remarkable clip and opt to do it all again. The energy to read recycles, reincarnates, reinvigorates, and you hope never to give up the journey; even after you have lined up your finished books like the proud trophies they are, there is always a little more room, another book case to fill, another story to sink into. Finished Mann’s Buddenbrooks, well there’s always The Magic Mountain or Doctor Faustus. You’ve read those two Flauberts but there’s more Proust to dig into, a seemingly endless supply of it. Turgenev always wins over the other, more popular Russians, but there is not much of him along the walls, save the obvious in Fathers and Sons. You’d read more Dostoyevsky if you didn’t hate his guts and think he was an anti-semite and in many ways a difficult and stifling writer. You need to read more women, it’s a fault of the whole system, the whole structure, but for your part you do love Woolf, Chopin, Cather, Stein; Wharton is an undeniable great but her meanness never ceases and it’s not clear she even likes her characters.

But no matter who you choose—or rather who chooses you—the point is never to give up on books or decline what they have to offer. The point is to never cease searching for some little taste of paradise that we had previously lacked, to find the good in the bad, the large in the small, the mediocre in the great. You can see in three dimension and you can read in four. To live other lives is to live your own more fully. You can’t believe it sometimes, the depth, the brevity, the longevity, the incalculable gifts given to us by people who worked sitting down. It is connection that we are looking for when we pace like ghosts up the hallways of some magnificent temple of literature, filled to bursting with every voice; male, female, Black, white, and all varieties of humanity. Nothing can touch us, and by the same token, everything can. For we want it to. We will it to. For if Fate has deemed it, we go home happy—and if we’re lucky, stay that way.

M. G. Turner

Read more

Ernest Hemingway and the Agony of Inspiration by M. G. Turner

/0 Comments/in , , /by

As a writer, I’ve had multiple run-ins with Ernest Hemingway. The first was in the spring of 2021, following the airing of the Ken Burns documentary, and the most recent was last month, after buying a large Hemingway boxed-set, which I wolfed down in two weeks. The set included The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms, which I had previously tried to read all the way through and failed.

This time I did not fail. But perhaps I should have. You see, for the past year I have been completing a novel that has its stylistic roots in what I like to think of as “modern gothic” with what I hope is fluid and frankly beautiful prose. My work tends to come from a much different aesthetic place than those who follow the Hemingway method, i.e., Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, and George Saunders; yet to my chagrin I found, as I pressed through the great and tragic author’s oeuvre I was losing my sense of self, my sense of who I am as a writer. There are some writers, and artists in other fields, whose voice and style are so magnetic, so enveloping, that they instill in the reader or viewer the sense of nothing having existed before or after them. Hemingway is a quintessential example of this, and an author whom most aspiring writers need to tangle with at some point. And for me, this past month, my collision with Hemingway came, and I left the ring, as it were, feeling as if I’d been continually punched in the face. This could be due to the quick, jabbing, declarative nature of Hemingway’s prose—it stands to reason that he himself was an avid boxer—and clearly brought this quality into even his most lengthy, involved novels such as A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Some writers—I’d even say most—try a different approach with the reader. Some lull, some soothe, and some entertain. Hemingway does none of the above. Hemingway berates and belittles, but he also rescues and redeems. Which is why, even when I recently felt his voice becoming my own, and my boundaries yielding to his force of will, I did not put his books down, did not shunt my new boxed-set onto a high shelf, did not flee the ring. I stood firm. I withstood. I, and most importantly, my young novel survived.

***

I work with fiction writers almost every day, as an editor and a literary representative. Most of the time I think half of my job is to help each writer tangle with the demons embedded in their prose, thorny eruptions that can spring up at any moment. In even more poetic terms, I see myself as a Horatio, Hamlet’s loyal friend, who stands fast as the ghost of his father the fallen confronts the young prince and forces him to wrestle with his conscience. On the page we come face to face with ourselves, and when we read books we come face to face with other people. Naturally every writer, when working in the most effective capacity, will bring themselves to the page, so it stands to reason that when one reads Hemingway they not only read him, they face him, and sometimes even face off with him.

If you’ll allow one more boxing metaphor, when we pick up, say, A Farewell to Arms, we are contending with an experience that Hemingway has transmuted to the page in terms as stark as he could muster. He dares you to withstand him and what he experienced. You feel like you are slogging through the mud, feel like you are tangling through the trenches, and when Henry’s dear love Catherine Barkley dies in childbirth he makes you go through it with him, mourning her to the last page as he denies us even a smidgen of satisfaction. “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.” Henry does not cry. He does not scream. He simply stumbles on, injured and broken, just as we, having made it to page 332 stumble on.

I know all this sounds like I don’t like Hemingway very much. Quite the contrary—I love him. But it is precisely this love, this agony of inspiration, that writers must learn how to handle. When I was younger it was easy to read a page or two of A Moveable Feast and think, okay this is how it’s done, and immediately run to the computer or a notebook and put down a litany of irredeemably declarative sentences. Now that I am a bit older, this doesn’t happen as readily, and I am able, perhaps because of my sense of self—fragile though it continues to be—to manage it, and am able to cross the tightrope of influence and homage.

As Rainer Maria Rilke posited in Letters to a Young Poet an artist must work with whatever is only theirs, and no one else’s. This sounds easy enough, and yet it is probably one of the hardest things a writer can do, and maybe the biggest accomplishment next to putting a period on the final sentence of a great work. How does one withstand, to use a word I’ve deployed already too often, the gravitational pull of someone so monumentally important to our culture and still have faith and confidence in what they’re offering a reader? I know I used the second person when posing that question, but I am talking about myself as much as others. How was I supposed to let my own novel live when Hemingway had seemingly dashed apart my style with a few choice sentences? The word “confident” kept flooding back to my mind, because the way he comes across on the page is as someone who is so utterly convinced of his literary excellence and aesthetic brilliance that anything less—or more importantly, different—is exactly that, less.

But I am here to say: this is false. Though his confidence, even certainty in his style, made him the great writer we know him as, it does not mean other possible fictive valences are worthless, or worth less than his own. When analyzed further, how could it possibly be the only way? A signature of life is its diversity and essential uniqueness. Human beings are varied, not only in terms of race and creed, but also in personality, and yes, style. One writer cannot define the entirety of the canon, no matter how hard they try, or people try for them.

***

But again, I love Hemingway. And I also love what I am working on—you must. This may sound conceited, or foolhardy, but I think loving the pages on your desk is essential to those pages finding an audience and living. I believe a literary figure like Hemingway must be seen in the context of his times, for today, due to his lack of preamble and exposition, he might not have made it out of the pages of minor publications. But in the same way, do we judge Wilt Chamberlain, the only professional basketball player ever to score 100 points in a single game, by the standards of excellence in the current NBA? We do not.

This is all to say that ideas about the greatest writer or the greatest style are inconclusive. I firmly believe anyone, regardless of ultimate success, when they put pen to paper—or fingers to keyboard—are trying to put down the greatest sentence ever. No one enters this field with dreams of mediocrity. We slip into the ring bravely, and work with what we have, with what is most accessible; eventually, if we are lucky, we eschew all influence and find that now vague concept: our voice, that which comes solely from ourselves. We may have influences. We may have shadings in our work that relate or are in conversation with those who came before, but at heart our best work is apt to come when we are in touch with our innermost quality of command, our innermost narrative, our personal dreams. Hemingway had his dreams. And we have ours. But I suspect we will continue to box with him, and writers of all styles, backgrounds, and understandings, until this experiment ends—and let’s hope it never will.


 

 

 

 

M. G. Turner
June 2022

Read more

Sold: “Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Life” by Todd Goddard

/7 Comments/in , , , /by

I’m very excited to announce that under the banner of my literary agency Philip Turner Book Productions I’ve sold Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Life to Blackstone Publishing in print, ebook, and audiobook, on behalf of my author client Todd Goddard, associate professor of literary studies at Utah Valley University.  This will be the first biography to chronicle the fascinating, large life of the acclaimed poet and fiction writer (1937-2016). Goddard will examine all aspects of Harrison’s creative life, and how he incorporated major life milestones in to his work. Among those momentous events:

  •  The fatal car wreck that killed Jim’s father and sister when he was twenty-four; he blamed himself as they were heading to a weekend stay at a family cabin for which Jim had intended to join them until his last-minute cancellation delayed their departure. The tragedy spiraled Jim in to a deep depression, while also spurring his dedication to writing, as he soon after published his earliest poems and met Denise Levertov who shepherded his first book to publication, a poetry collection from Norton.
  • Jim received an introduction to Jack Nicholson who became a patron, supporting him financially through the completion of the three novellas that would become the collection,  Legends of the Fall; this relationship led to work on film projects and relief from the money woes that had long burdened him. Through this he also formed associations with many Hollywood figures including Anjelica Huston, John Huston, John Belushi, director Bob Rafelson and his wife Toby, who had made the match with Nicholson, and Stanley Kubrick, with whom Jim played chess.
  • Working with publisher Seymour Lawrence, who embraced the idea of publishing a collection of novellas, an unorthodox experiment that other publishers of the day were not eager to take on. Interviews by the biographer with Harrison’s longtime agent Bob Datilla explore the relationship between the writer and publisher.

Harrison’s sense of place will also be key to the narrative, as Goddard explores the importance of landscape in Jim’s poetry and fiction, mapping his life and situating him topographically. This process will unfold throughout the book in a number of important locales, from the lakes and forests of Michigan, to the crashing surf of the Florida Keys, to Greenwich Village where he drank with Jack Kerouac at the Five Spot bar, to hardscrabble Durango, Mexico, as well as Montana, Hollywood, Arizona, and Provence, France.

Todd Goddard regularly teaches Harrison’s fiction and poetry, and has presented research on Harrison’s works for the Jim Harrison Society at the American Literature Association’s annual conference. His research is well underway, already taking him in to the Harrison archive courtesy of the late author’s estate, thanks to an introduction by generous executives at Grove Atlantic. The archive includes correspondence with Raymond Carver, Francis Ford Coppola, Annie Dillard, Louise Erdrich, Allen Ginsberg, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Norman Mailer, Gary Snyder, David Foster Wallace, Terry Tempest Williams, and Tom McGuane.

Goddard is also in touch with the The Jim Harrison Author Page on Facebook, where more than 10,000 fans celebrate the writer’s life, from preparing a special cassoulet to arranging bookstore discussions of Harrison’s work.

In Harrison’s later years, he was twice a featured guest on Anthony Bourdain’s TV shows, gaining a status as an elder statesman of American letters and enlightened living. With such biographies as Madison Smartt Bell’s work on Robert Stone (Doubleday, published this month), it’s a propitious time for this biography of Jim Harrison.

 

Read more

A Quartet of Summer Readings at Books Are Magic

/0 Comments/in , , , , /by

Just attended a really enjoyable quartet of author readings for three books-in-progress, and one that just been sold to a publisher this week, at Books Are Magic in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. An MC informed members of the audience that the Brooklyn Writers Space, with two locations in the borough, was a sponsor of the reading series. The four participants, and evidently many other local scribes, find space to work and write there, at what we heard are “humane” rents.

I had come primarily to hear journalist Diantha Parker read from what I understood would be a memoir about her father. I’m enthralled by a lot of first person writing, so I went eager to hear some of the work. Parker read first. She set up her excerpt by explaining that in the very early days of WWII, before the US was in the war, her father, a rather proper Bostonian, had enlisted in the Canadian forces to join the fight against fascism. He fought in and survived the lethal battle of Dieppe, where he was captured and made a Canadian POW for the next three years.

She read well, with many deft strokes about his life and dark habits, a complicated man whose postwar life was shadowed by his brutal years as a captive, and the near-death march he and other Allied prisoners endured just before war’s end. Other passages showed how she’s fleshing out what this all means to her now, so many decades later. I was fascinated by the Canadian aspects of the story, and can imagine that many Canadian editors I know, and reader friends there, would likely be interested in the story. Fair to say, I will now be eager to read or hear more from her work.

The other readers were also excellent: Ryan Harty, Joanna Hershon, and Julie Orringer, all published novelists. Their work was also all very strong, and quite varied one from another. Bravo to the Brooklyn Writers Group, which is clearly helping writers produce great work. First pic here is Diantha Parker. Books Are Magic is a very nice bookstore, with a superb vibe for readings!

 

 

 

 

Read more

Remembering Drue Heinz—Prolific Cultural Benefactor—and Ellen Hunnicutt, Novelist of Music and the Circus

/1 Comment/in , , /by

I discovered Ellen Hunnicutt and her novel in my first publishing job, a six-week stint I did at Scribner Publishing as first reader/contest judge for the Maxwell Perkins Prize, named in honor of the house’s venerable editor of many important writers including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Ernest Hemingway. Mildred Marmur, Scribner’s publisher at the time, then and since a great friend to me and many other publishing people, gave me what became my first break in publishing. I’d been referred to her to inquire about a full-time editorial job; I made an appointment, went to see her and introduced myself, explaining I’d worked in my family’s bookstore business for seven years, and wanted to become an editor. She said she had no full-time editorial positions open, but there was the Perkins contest to judge, and a conference room full of mailed submissions awaiting the attentions of a first reader. As a bookseller I’d read and sold A. Scott Berg’s Maxwell Perkins: Editor of Genius and was thrilled with the job. Working three days each week, I sat in Scribner’s conference room with jiffy bags and manuscripts stacked up around me like drying cord wood. My assignment was to unpack all these mailers and read between 5-50 pages of each entry, fill out a brief questionnaire, and signal a thumbs-down or -up for a possible second reading by the full-time editorial staff. Coincidentally, I recommended 70 entries, or 10%, for second readings. There was one entry I really loved, by a writer called E.M. Hunnicutt, for which I eagerly read far more than the 50 pages. My recommendation of it was more enthusiastic than for any other candidate, but it didn’t win the prize. Before finishing the job, I wrote down the author’s phone number and made a copy of the manuscript.

With this first stretch in the ink mines under my belt, I did soon get my first full-time editorial job, at Walker & Company, then a sleepy publisher of young adult non-fiction and genre fiction (Westerns, mysteries, Regency romances, etc.), published mostly for libraries. My genre was to be “men’s adventure.” Still, Walker had in its early years published books by John Le Carre and Flann O’Brien, so I was hopeful that I wouldn’t only be acquiring the male equivalent of bodice-rippers. My first week at Walker I called the E.M.-initialed author and soon found myself talking with “Ellen” Hunnicutt. She told me she’d long used the initials to disguise her gender, since she had sold many stories to Boys’ Life over the years. I told her how much I had liked reading her draft manuscript, with its compelling narrator, Ada, an adolescent girl and musical prodigy who’s fled a bizarre custody battle that engulfed her family in the wake of her mother’s death. She’s sought safe harbor amid a circus troupe that’s wintering over in a quiet Florida camp and found solace in composing a requiem for her late mom on the troupe’s calliope. Ellen and I hit it off beautifully and her novel became the first original manuscript I ever acquired. Over the year that followed, Ellen and I engaged in a vigorous dialogue about her novel and its theme–the creative purposes to which suffering and mourning may be put. In the course of my editing and her revising, Ellen became reinvigorated with her own book, which she’d earlier thought she’d finished. In the course of the edit, she told me about other circus and carny writers, like Jim Tully, whose his 1927 book, Circus Parade she praised for its unsentimental portrait of the raffish big-top life, which influenced her work. She explained she’d read many of Tully’s books early in her life and that his fiction and nonfiction chronicles of hobo life, circus characters, and the down-and-out of the Great Depression had still been widely read when she was a young woman.

For the record, I should add that before Suite for Calliope was published in July of 1987 it received a starred review in Kirkus*; later, Dell bought the paperback rights, and Walker sold out its first hardcover printing. The starred Kirkus happened to land on my desk on May 4, a fateful date on my perpetual calendar: the anniversary of the shootings at Kent State in 1970, the date that Undercover Books opened for business in 1978, and Ellen Hunnicutt’s birthday, which I didn’t even know when I phoned her with the news and read it to her, in this time before fax machines were common, affording me the opportunity to place one of the happiest birthday calls I’ve ever made. And then, before the novel went to the printer, Ellen was notified she’d won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for her short fiction, described in the Facebook post above, and that the senior judge for the award had been Nadine Gordimer, who wrote in her citation: “Ellen Hunnicutt is adventurous… and her images are splendidly suggestive….Witty stories, jubilantly told.”

Working with Ellen was a great privilege and affirmed my ardent interest in modern nomads and the circus life. For a 2004 Carroll & Graf anthology, Step Right Up: Stories of Carnivals, Sideshows, and the Circus, my editorial colleague who made the selections, Nate Knaebel, smartly chose to include a chapter from Suite for Calliope, which he wrote “describes the anticipation of opening day at an Indiana circus, and a near tragedy averted by the power of music.” Nate also included “With Folded Hands Forever,” a dark passage from Tully’s Circus Parade.

Ellen kept writing in the years that followed, and we remained in touch. However, I’m sad to report that the two books Ellen published in 1987 would be the only books she published in her lifetime, which came to an untimely end in 2003. She was 72. If you’re intrigued by the themes and motifs of her work, I urge you to seek out her books. As for Drue Heinz, the obit from the Pittsburgh Press-Gazette is linked to here.  http://www.post-gazette.com/news/obituaries/2018/03/30/Drue-Heinz-former-publisher-of-The-Paris-Review-dies-at-103/stories/201803300124

The starred Kirkus review of Suite for Calliope:
“An extraordinary first novel that, in its remarkable inventiveness, intelligence, and charm-struck humanity, should draw—and more than richly reward—readers of almost every inclination. Ada Cunningham, of Richmount, Indiana is the partly crippled daughter of gifted and highly eccentric parents: a journalist mother who declares Ada to be a prodigy, raises her as such (with flamboyant elan), then dies suddenly when her daughter is eight years old; and a father who is a musical genius, who came from poverty and was a transient violinist and artful dodger as a child, who gives Ada music lessons from the time she’s three, and who is committed to an asylum before she is 16. Life with these parents–as described by the brave, unflinching, quick, forgiving, and heartwrenchingly observant Ada–would be matter enough for many a novel, but this one soars on toward farther ends that keep the reader wide-eyed and enthralled. There’s a penetrating mystery at the heart of it all, and, before its solution: an aunt who comes into the picture with malevolent aims (she may even want to murder Ada), a burned house, legal proceedings–as result of all of which Ada, accused of being both a witch and a madwoman, flees Richmount and takes to the road (as her father did before her), supporting herself by her wits and by her gifted piano playing (in brothels and bars), until at last she finds sanctuary and refuge in the winter quarters of a circus troupe–with setting, color, and cast of characters worthy of yet another novel–where she becomes (and remains) calliope player, composer, and loved member of this wondrous new “family.” A summary leaves out far too much: the sturdy grace of Ada’s never-self-pitying voice; the continual feast of homely detail, and detail of music, musicians, and musical instruments, as weft as of the circus and its people; and the breathtaking symbolic depth of the whole, which, touched by the hand of this gifted writer, serves to place Ada’s birth, her flight, and her high artist’s quest among very august novelistic company indeed. A prodigiously masterful novel of profundity, breadth, and continual delight: waiting now only for what ought to be its very, very many readers.”

Read more

Sold: “More Deadly than the Male: The First Ladies of Horror”

/0 Comments/in , , /by
I’m excited to have put together a deal for my author client Graeme Davis to edit and introduce a new anthology, More Deadly than the Male: The First Ladies of Horror, which Pegasus Books will publish in 2019. This follows up Davis’s 2017 anthology for Pegasus, Colonial Horrors: Sleepy Hollow and Beyond.
Details today on publishersmarketplace[dot]com:
<<Graeme Davis’s MORE DEADLY THAN THE MALE: The First Ladies of Horror, a new anthology collecting the best tales of horror by twenty-five female authors—both heralded and lesser-known figures—nearly all of whom published before the 1900s, presenting them to the modern reader with notes on the writers and their stories; included are works by Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Louisa May Alcott, Edith Wharton, Mary Austin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edith Nesbit, and Madame Blavatsky, alongside discoveries like Mary Cholmondely and Charlotte Riddell, to Claiborne Hancock at Pegasus, in a nice deal, for publication in 2019, by Philip Turner at Philip Turner Book Productions (world).>>

Read more

Update on Carl Rollyson’s “The Last Days of Sylvia Plath”

/1 Comment/in , , /by

Readers of this blog may recall that in January I posted about a new book I’d sold as literary agent, The Last Days of Sylvia Plath by Carl Rollyson. That post announced a deal I made for the volume rights with the University Press of Mississippi. Today I’m announcing that the author and I have also sold audio book rights to Blackstone Audio, to be published at the same time as the UPM book.

In 2013, Rollyson published American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath, a full biography that chronicled Plath’s whole life, ending though it did even before her 31st birthday; in contrast, the new book will be a concise narrative covering just the last four months leading up to the poet’s suicide in 1963. From the sample material we’ve shared with both publishers, it’s fair to say Rollyon’s new book will incorporate some elements reminiscent of what’s known in newspaper writing as a tick-tock—a time- or date-driven narrative that propels the reader forward in to the daily life of its subject.

The book will also examine the role of Ted Hughes in the end of his estranged wife’s life, and the subject of manic depressive illness. With Rollyson knowing the Plath world well, the narrative will be informed by his knowledge of key source materials, some of which no earlier books will have benefited from. I’m sure it will be engrossing in whatever format readers find it, print, digital, or audio.

Read more