NatPhung Thủ thư Sylvia Plath Cuốn sách được xuất bản dưới một bút danh lạ. Nhân vật chính trong The Bell Jar - Esther Greenwood, phải chịu đựng cơn trầm cảm nặng trong thời gian làm việc cho một tạp chí thời trang ở New York. Hai tuần sau khi sách ra đời, nhà văn cũng gieo mình xuống sông tự vẫn vì trầm cảm trước những bế tắc không thể giải quyết được của cuộc sống gia đình. Dưới đây là bản Anh văn.
Esther, an A-student from Boston who has won a guest editorship on a national magazine, finds a bewildering new world at her feet. Her New York life is crowded with possibilities, so that the choice of future is overwhelming, but she can no longer retreat into the safety of her past. Deciding she wants to be a writer above all else, Esther is also struggling with the perennial problems of morality, behaviour and identity. In this compelling autobiographical novel, a milestone in contemporary literature, Sylvia Plath chronicles her teenage years - her disappointments, anger, depression and eventual breakdown and treatment - with stunning wit and devastating honesty. "A vulnerable young girl wins a dream assignment on a big-time New York fashion magazine and finds herself plunged into a nightmare. An autobiographical account of Sylvia Plath's own mental breakdown and suicide attempt, The Bell Jar is more than a confessional novel, it is a comic but painful statement of what happens to a woman's aspirations in a society that refuses to take them seriously... a society that expects electroshock to cure the despair of a sensitive, questioning young artist whose search for identity becomes a terrifying descent toward madness. - Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. "A fine novel, as bitter and remorseless as her last poems -- the kind of book Salinger's Fanny might have written about herself ten years later, if she had spent those ten years in Hell." -- Robert Scholes, The New York Times Book Review. "By turns funny, harrowing, crude, ardent and artless. Its most notable quality is an astonishing immediacy, like a series of snapshots taken at high noon." -- Time. "A special poignance... a special force, a humbling power, because it shows the vulnerability of people of hope and good will." -- Newsweek. Wish you have happy moments with this book- Jie
