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A Bestselling Book of P try?
Daisy Maryles, with Dick Donahue -- 2/23/98
It's unusual for a book of p try to appear on a national bestseller list. But the appearance of Birthday Letters by Great Britain's P t Laureate Ted Hughes, from Farrar, Straus &Giroux, is being treated as a hard news story, with major press coverage in such outlets as Time, Newsweek, the New York Times and Newshour with Jim Lehrer. This Thursday (February 26), the Academy of American P ts will hold a public symposium at Manhattan's Cooper Union featuring such luminaries as A. Alvarez and Alicia Suskin Ostriker among the panelists. This volume of p try -- 88 p ms in all -- is the first time that Hughes has spoken or written about his romance with p t Sylvia Plath and their failed seven-year marriage, or offered any comment about her suicide 35 years ago. Plath, who won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for her p try (often strong, morbid images conveying the powerlessness of women in postwar America and her own deep loneliness) has, in the years since her death, become one the bestselling p ts of the century. FSG has gone back to press for a 25,000-copy fourth printing, bringing the in-print total to 110,000.

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