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1
Formerly Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II, the late Ted Hughes (1930-98) is recognized as one of the few contemporary poets whose work has mythic scope and power. And few episodes in postwar literature have the legendary stature of Hughes's romance with, and marriage to, the great American poet Sylvia Plath.
The poems in Birthday Letters are addressed (with just two exceptions) to Plath, and were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963. Some are love letters, others haunted recollections and ruminations. In... more Formerly Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II, the late Ted Hughes (1930-98) is recognized as one of the few contemporary poets whose work has mythic scope and power. And few episodes in postwar literature have the legendary stature of Hughes's romance with, and marriage to, the great American poet Sylvia Plath.
The poems in Birthday Letters are addressed (with just two exceptions) to Plath, and were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963. Some are love letters, others haunted recollections and ruminations. In them, Hughes recalls his and Plath's time together, drawing on the powerful imagery of his work--animal, vegetable, mythological--as well as on Plath's famous verse.
Countless books have discussed the subject of this intense relationship from a necessary distance, but this volume--at last--offers us Hughes's own account. Moreover, it's a truly remarkable collection of poems in its own right. less 
Evan ZimrothI never bought the whole Sylvia Plath thing from the beginning. I think he’s a fantastically interesting poet. I loved his first book The Hawk in the Rain – but this is a lovely, tender chronological collection in which he relives their original love affair and then their marriage. And he incorporates her work in his poetry, and everything is about “remember when we did this” and “remember when I... (Source)
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2
Poems
Linda Zisquit | 4.50
Poetry. The ease and directness of these poems make an unexpected testament of singularly complex feeling. Linda Zisquit's work is uniquely present, yet timeless. Its clarity has no equal -Robert Creeley. more Poetry. The ease and directness of these poems make an unexpected testament of singularly complex feeling. Linda Zisquit's work is uniquely present, yet timeless. Its clarity has no equal -Robert Creeley. less Evan ZimrothOh she’s a lovely lyrical poet. And she’s not confessional, so it’s not exactly clear that she’s talking about adultery. You can make that assumption. She’s talking about transgression and about guilt. It’s not a novel and its certainly not a memoir, so it’s quite elliptical. She talks about “a woman with no boundaries” and a woman with no boundaries can do anything. That’s what’s so seductive... (Source)
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3
Annie Ernaux, Tanya Leslie | 3.62
In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction, an unnamed narrator attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her two-year relationship with a married foreigner where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved, or is subject to her cold indifference. With courage and exactitude, she seeks the truth behind an existence lived entirely for someone else, and, in the pieces of its aftermath, she is able to find it. more In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction, an unnamed narrator attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her two-year relationship with a married foreigner where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved, or is subject to her cold indifference. With courage and exactitude, she seeks the truth behind an existence lived entirely for someone else, and, in the pieces of its aftermath, she is able to find it. less Evan ZimrothAnd the sensibility is totally different. Nothing is in the present. It’s all about waiting. There’s a lover, who’s never named, or rather only as ‘A’: a cipher. And the protagonist is waiting for him to phone, waiting for him to come up the stairs. You hear almost nothing about the sexual act. The pleasure is instantly pain, because it’s about loss. And this is what adultery is about,... (Source)
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4
Shanghai, 1927 --- hot, teeming, mysterious. Kenneth Ayres, a disciple of Freud, lives as an anonymous expatriate, treating the lonely wives and daughters of British colonials. When Julia Paradise, the wife of an Australian missionary, enters his life, he is seduced into her world, a brilliantly colored jigsaw puzzle of incestuous eroticism and grotesque and magical images.
Ayres becomes obsessed with Julia --- exploring her lush and haunted mind through hypnosis, and her body through regular Tuesday afternoon adultery. She leads him into a labyrinth of hallucinations, manipulated... more Shanghai, 1927 --- hot, teeming, mysterious. Kenneth Ayres, a disciple of Freud, lives as an anonymous expatriate, treating the lonely wives and daughters of British colonials. When Julia Paradise, the wife of an Australian missionary, enters his life, he is seduced into her world, a brilliantly colored jigsaw puzzle of incestuous eroticism and grotesque and magical images.
Ayres becomes obsessed with Julia --- exploring her lush and haunted mind through hypnosis, and her body through regular Tuesday afternoon adultery. She leads him into a labyrinth of hallucinations, manipulated memories, and transparent lies, where the truth is never absolute and even the past is transformed. As Shanghai erupts in revolution, Ayres is left to piece together the puzzle, and the reader to map the realms of mystery, dreams, imagination, and myth in this extraordinary novel. less Evan ZimrothShe has an affair with a Scottish doctor – a very unpleasant Scottish doctor – a disciple of Freud. She’s an hysteric and he wants to find out the etiology of her hysteria. And he does it, basically, by ass-fucking her. (Source)
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5
This exquisite, resonant novel by PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter is a brilliant portrait of a marriage by a contemporary American master. It is the story of Nedra and Viri, whose favored life is centered around dinners, ingenious games with their children, enviable friends, and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach. But even as he lingers over the surface of their marriage, Salter lets us see the fine cracks that are spreading through it, flaws that will eventually mar the lovely picture beyond repair. Seductive, witty, and elegantly nuanced, Light... more This exquisite, resonant novel by PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter is a brilliant portrait of a marriage by a contemporary American master. It is the story of Nedra and Viri, whose favored life is centered around dinners, ingenious games with their children, enviable friends, and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach. But even as he lingers over the surface of their marriage, Salter lets us see the fine cracks that are spreading through it, flaws that will eventually mar the lovely picture beyond repair. Seductive, witty, and elegantly nuanced, Light Years is a classic novel of an entire generation that discovered the limits of its own happiness—and then felt compelled to destroy it. less Evan ZimrothMy first James Salter novel is A Sport and a Pastime. It’s short and amazing. It’s not about adultery, it’s about a passionate love affair between a young, callow American guy and an even younger French woman. And the idea of the affair is that they just completely surrender themselves. And that is a religious idea. But what they surrender themselves to is what Salter calls “incandescent... (Source)
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6
Graham Greene, Michael Gorra | 3.92
"A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses a moment of experience from which to look ahead..."
"This is a record of hate far more than of love," writes Maurice Bendrix in the opening passages of The End of the Affair, and it is a strange hate indeed that compels him to set down the retrospective account of his adulterous affair with Sarah Miles.
Now, a year after Sarah's death, Bendrix seeks to exorcise the persistence of his passion by retracing its course from obsessive love to love-hate. At first, he believes he hates Sarah and her husband,... more "A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses a moment of experience from which to look ahead..."
"This is a record of hate far more than of love," writes Maurice Bendrix in the opening passages of The End of the Affair, and it is a strange hate indeed that compels him to set down the retrospective account of his adulterous affair with Sarah Miles.
Now, a year after Sarah's death, Bendrix seeks to exorcise the persistence of his passion by retracing its course from obsessive love to love-hate. At first, he believes he hates Sarah and her husband, Henry. Yet as he delves further into his emotional outlook, Bendrix's hatred shifts to the God he feels has broken his life, but whose existence at last comes to recognize. less Evan Zimroth(Laughs) Well that is a provocative question. This may come as a surprise, but I got into Gangsters, not because of the adultery, but because of the theology. So in other words, what I was doing before I began work on it was to join a study group of writers and biblical scholars who came together to talk about different parts of The Bible. And I had never done anything of the kind before. I’d... (Source)
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