The Bell Jar American Classics Edition A Novel

"There's the depression of popular conception-the listless sadness of a character in a pharmaceutical advertisement-and then there's the biting, brisk, darkly comic version that Plath brings to life in The Bell Jar. It is a curiously unyielding read: Though the book is semi-autobiographical, Plath's lucid prose belies the mystery she was and remains. . . . The Bell Jar is as frustrating and brilliant as its author." - Elizabeth Bruenig, The Atlantic

"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

"The first-person narrative fixes us there, in the doctor's office, in the asylum, in the madness, with no reassuring vacations when we can keep company with the sane and listen to their lectures." - Washington Post

"The narrator simply describes herself as feeling very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel. The in-between moment is just what Miss Plath's poetry does catch brilliantly-the moment poised on the edge of chaos." - Christian Science Monitor

"Sylvia Plath was a luminous talent. . . one of the most interesting poets in American literature." - New York Review of Books

"Movingly chronicled. . . . It's funny, intense, enormously human." - Cosmopolitan

"The Bell Jar is regarded as a coming-of-age masterpiece . . . . Sylvia Plath has become of the influential writers of her time." - Boston Globe

"It is this perfectly wrought prose and the freshness of Plath's voice in The Bell Jar that make this book enduring in its appeal." - USA Today