Red Comet
The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
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Narrated by:
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Laura Jennings
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By:
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Heather Clark
About this listen
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
The highly anticipated biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art.
“One of the most beautiful biographies I've ever read." (Glennon Doyle, author of number one New York Times best seller, Untamed)
With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials, Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant Sylvia Plath, who had precocious poetic ambition and was an accomplished published writer even before she became a star at Smith College. Refusing to read Plath’s work as if her every act was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark considers the sociopolitical context as she thoroughly explores Plath’s world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her troubles with an unenlightened mental health industry; her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes; and much more.
Clark’s clear-eyed portraits of Hughes, his lover Assia Wevill, and other demonized players in the arena of Plath’s suicide promote a deeper understanding of her final days. Along with illuminating readings of the poems themselves, Clark’s meticulous, compassionate research brings us closer than ever to the spirited woman and visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women poets the world over.
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Critic reviews
A New York Times Top 10 Book of the Year • Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the LA Times Book Prize • A New York Times Notable Book • Named a Book of the Year: O, the Oprah Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Boston Globe, Literary Hub, The Times (London), The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, and The Times of India • Winner of the Biographers' Club Slightly Foxed Prize for Best First Biography
“Mesmerizing . . . Comprehensive . . . Stuffed with heretofore untold anecdotes that illuminate or extend our understanding of Plath’s life . . . Clark is a felicitous writer and a discerning critic of Plath’s poetry . . . There is no denying the book’s intellectual power and, just as important, its sheer readability.” —The New York Times
“A majestic tome with the narrative propulsion of a thriller. We now have the complete story.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“An exhaustively researched, frequently brilliant masterwork. . . . It is an impressive achievement representing a prizeworthy contribution to literary scholarship and biographical journalism.” —The Washington Post
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- By Sara on 01-15-16
By: Vera Brittain
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Gathering Blossoms Under Fire
- The Journals of Alice Walker
- By: Alice Walker, Valerie Boyd - editor
- Narrated by: Aunjanue Ellis, Alice Walker, Janina Edwards
- Length: 22 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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From National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Alice Walker and edited by critic and writer Valerie Boyd, comes an unprecedented compilation of Walker’s fifty years of journals drawing an intimate portrait of her development over five decades as an artist, human rights and women’s activist, and intellectual.
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A must-read for any creative artist!!
- By amazonluver on 04-30-22
By: Alice Walker, and others
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Labyrinths
- Emma Jung, Her Marriage to Carl, and the Early Years of Psychoanalysis
- By: Catrine Clay
- Narrated by: Karen Cass
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Clever and ambitious, Emma Jung yearned to study the natural sciences at the University of Zurich. But the strict rules of proper Swiss society at the beginning of the 20th century dictated that a woman of Emma's stature - one of the richest heiresses in Switzerland - travel to Paris to "finish" her education, to prepare for marriage to a suitable man. Engaged to the son of one of her father's wealthy business colleagues, Emma's conventional and predictable life was upended when she met Carl Jung.
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Carl plays center stage
- By Sparrowhawk on 12-23-16
By: Catrine Clay
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House of Dreams
- The Life of L.M. Montgomery
- By: Liz Rosenberg, Julie Morstad - illustrator
- Narrated by: Susan Hanfield
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Once upon a time, there was a girl named Maud who adored stories. When she was fourteen years old, Maud wrote in her journal, "I love books. I hope when I grow up to be able to have lots of them." Not only did Maud grow up to own lots of books, she wrote twenty-four of them herself as L. M. Montgomery, the world-renowned author of Anne of Green Gables. For many years, her lifelong struggles with anxiety and depression, her "year of mad passion" and her difficult married life were buried deep within her unpublished personal journals....
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Home’o’dreams
- By Steve G. on 02-25-20
By: Liz Rosenberg, and others
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C.S. Lewis
- A Biography of Friendship
- By: Colin Duriez
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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An Oxford student of C.S. Lewis' said he found his new tutor interesting and was told by J.R.R. Tolkien, "Interesting? Yes, he's certainly that. You'll never get to the bottom of him." You can learn a great deal about people by their friends and nowhere is this more true than in the case of C.S. Lewis, the remarkable academic, author, popularizer of faith - and creator of Narnia. He lost his mother early in life and became estranged from his father, much to his regret.
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It's a Great Concept
- By James on 08-13-20
By: Colin Duriez
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Square Haunting
- Five Writers in London Between the Wars
- By: Francesca Wade
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 13 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Mecklenburgh Square has always been a radical address. Nestled in the heart of Bloomsbury, these townhouses have borne witness to the lives of some of the century's most revolutionary cultural figures - many of whom were extraordinary women. United by their desire to experiment with new ways of living - and, therefore, of being - these authors and thinkers were trailblazers in their commitment to creative independence.
By: Francesca Wade
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The Voice is All
- The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac
- By: Joyce Johnson
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 16 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Voice Is All, Joyce Johnson - coauthor of the classic memoir Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac - brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac's French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider's vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted in the composition of On the Road.
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Kerouac's Voice
- By Robert L. Stofel on 09-26-12
By: Joyce Johnson
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Eleanor in the Village
- By: Jan Jarboe Russell
- Narrated by: Samantha Desz
- Length: 5 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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A captivating blend of personal history detailing Eleanor’s struggle with issues of marriage, motherhood, financial independence, and femininity, and a vibrant portrait of one of the most famous neighborhoods in the world, this unique work examines the ways that the sensibility, mood, and various inhabitants of the neighborhood influenced the First Lady’s perception of herself and shaped her political views over four decades, up to her death in 1962.
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Grabs your attention
- By Amanda Hodges on 05-13-21
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The Last Love Song
- A Biography of Joan Didion
- By: Tracy Daugherty
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 26 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction.
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Riveted for 1591 miles
- By Kaysi12 on 04-11-16
By: Tracy Daugherty
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Genius & Anxiety
- How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947
- By: Norman Lebrecht
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 18 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Norman Lebrecht has devoted half of his life to pondering and researching the mindset of the Jewish intellectuals, writers, scientists, and thinkers who turned the tides of history and shaped the world today as we know it. In Genius & Anxiety, Lebrecht begins with the Communist Manifesto in 1847 and ends in 1947, when Israel was founded. This robust, magnificent volume, beautifully designed, is an urgent and necessary celebration of Jewish genius and contribution.
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Post-anxiety
- By Amaze on 03-27-20
By: Norman Lebrecht
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Sontag
- Her Life and Work
- By: Benjamin Moser
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 22 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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No writer is as emblematic of the American 20th century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture.
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Cloying voice
- By Suzanne on 11-02-19
By: Benjamin Moser
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This Close to Happy
- A Reckoning with Depression
- By: Daphne Merkin
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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This Close to Happy is the rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression, written from a woman's perspective and informed by an acute understanding of the implications of this disease over a lifetime. Taking off from essays on depression she has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, Daphne Merkin casts her eye back to her beginnings to try to sort out the root causes of her affliction.
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I should be the last person to recommend this book
- By Mariaposa on 03-04-17
By: Daphne Merkin
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Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. In his myriad lives he was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, a priest, an MP—and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. Along the way he converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a sixteen-year old girl without her father’s consent, struggled to feed a family of ten children, and was often ill and in pain.
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Oh but the narration…
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Don’t read if you don’t want your fond memories...
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From the summer of 1870 to the spring of 1871, famously dubbed the "Terrible Year" by Victor Hugo, Paris and its people were besieged, starved, and forced into surrender by Germans-then imperiled again as radical republicans established a breakaway Commune, ultimately crushed by the French Army after bloody street battles and the burning of central Paris.
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a fascinating historical, political, cultural, and artistic nexus in time
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What listeners say about Red Comet
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- M. Consol
- 07-25-21
An amazing, electric and tragic life
For decades I’ve heard the name of Sylvia Path invoked on the pages of the New York Times Book Review and its podcast, only to wonder who this woman really was. Obviously, a woman of great influence among other writers. When Heather Clark’s bio of Plath was published it was time to finally to resolve this personal mystery.
What an amazing and tragic life. This book is both inspiring and heartbreaking and, despite already knowing how Plath’s life ended, the tension of waiting hundreds of pages for the final event was spellbinding. I also came to know Ted Hughes, her estranged husband, and the most popular British poet at the time, who, like Plath, also suffered from the dark moods of depression, though to a far lesser degree.
Plath’s college years at Smith were so auspicious, as her poetic talent developed and men were draw to this tall, vivacious woman by the dozens. Plath became a prolific dater and learned to resent the sexual freedom afforded to men but denied to women. Eventually it is Ted Hughes who becomes the enduring love of her life, albeit a tempestuous pairing. Hughes’ voracious sexual appetite leads him astray, and Plath’s fury and pursuit of vengeance results in a flurry of her most electric poetry, as well as a novel (The Bell Jar) that still sells about 100,000 copies her year and has sold a total of nearly 4 million copies since its 1963 release.
What an honor it would have been to spend some weeks with Sylvia Plath, but this sprawling and detailed recounting of her life by Heather Clark is the next best thing.
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- Suzie
- 06-14-21
Never a huge fan of poetry
Found this book so enlightening. Long but never mundane. What an incredible talented woman fighting to be true to herself but yet needing to conform to the manuscript of the times. Now to read her poetry which, I’m sure, will convert me.
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- ThisIsHowYoullAppearToOtherCustomers
- 10-06-22
Eh
The book is fine but the narration is pleading and desperate. It's very strange and depressing.
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- ILR
- 05-12-22
Engrossing book, narrator is totally fine, read it
Though I was somewhat familiar with Sylvia Plath's poetry, this is my first biography of her. After reading some of the Audible reviews I was nervous about the narrator, but she was absolutely fine. Good even. She allowed the content of the book to shine. I'm coming away from this biography with a long list of other books I want to read next: The Bell Jar, Ted Hugh's Birthday Letters, Robert Lowell's Life Studies, Anne Sexton. This book really illustrates Plath's devotion to her writing and the hard work that went into developing her unique voice and style. I feel like one of the undercurrents of this particular biography is that Plath was a brilliant poet not because of her depression but in spite of it. I'm so glad I read it.
"Sylvia Plath did not think of herself as a depressive. She considered herself strong, passionate, intelligent, determined, and brave, like a character in a D.H. Lawrence novel. She was tough-minded and filled her journal with exhortations to work harder--evidence, others have said, of her pathological, neurotic perfectionism. Another interpretation is that she was--like many male writers--simply ambitious, eager to make her mark on the world. She knew that depression was her greatest adversary...."
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- BAHM
- 03-24-22
Well-written and well-researched
This a long, thorough,balanced, and interesting biography of Sylvia Plath. I found it fascinating.
I loved the reader’s voice, but she mispronounced a number of words during the 40 plus hour audiobook. Otherwise, no complaints.
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- sarlachan
- 04-15-23
One of the best biographies I’ve read
Don't let the length of 45 hours worry you; you’ll have trouble with pausing this story. The biography covers Sylvia Plath's life, starting with the history of her parents and continuing up until Ted's death. It shows not only Sylvia's life, but also how she was shaped by her predecessors and her impact after her death. This biography completely changed my perspective on Sylvia Plath, who is often depicted as a depressive genius who was a captive to her own mental illness. In reality, Sylvia was a vibrant, charismatic, and complex woman who embodied both consistency and contradiction. Even if you're not a fan of poetry or literature, you will get a lot out of listening to this definitive biography of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.
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- DonnaMarie113
- 06-30-23
Boy, Was That a Long Book!
Effective narrator has pleasing voice. Book is long on details. Author provides facts from several perspectives so that much contemplating is the responsibility of reader to try and figure out where Sylvia was coming from regarding her personality as well as how much of her behavior was affected by her mental illness.
Very sad she left small children behind, yet maddening that she was permitted to go through so much electro-shock therapy. (The poor girl's brain musta been fried. Literally.)
My favorite comment from end of book: "Art is a rearrangement of truth."
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- Kathleen
- 02-27-21
One of the most remarkable biographies ever
This is a remarkable and well researched biography about the total personhood, daughter, woman, scholar, poet, wife and mother who was Sylvia Plath.
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- Maureen Ohalleran
- 01-13-22
This book stayed with me. Excellent listen!
I didn’t know what to expect with this book purchase, not knowing a lot about Sylvia Plath. I found it so interesting and sad. Although the book is really quite long, I didn’t want it to end. Makes me want to learn more about her and her work.
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- MERRY CLARK
- 12-21-21
Sylvia Plath was a great loss.
She would’ve been a great President, but her artistic sensibility probably would have gotten in the way, which is unfortunate. The most passionate, creative women do not usually choose politics as a field of endeavor. This is our ongoing loss as a civilization.
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