
Pale Fire
1962 · 315 pages
A dead poet's 999 lines arrive wrapped in footnotes by a neighbor certain the poem is about his own lost northern kingdom. The ingenuity is total and the grief underneath is real.
★ 8.4

A dead poet's 999 lines arrive wrapped in footnotes by a neighbor certain the poem is about his own lost northern kingdom. The ingenuity is total and the grief underneath is real.

Esther Greenwood wins a month at a New York fashion magazine and comes home unable to want anything. Plath writes breakdown from the inside, down to the fig tree of futures rotting unchosen.