Heather recommends:
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams by Sylvia Plath
This is a collection of Sylvia Plath’s prose – short stories, journalism along with a few journal extracts – some of which had been thought lost for years. It’s a fascinating collection for many reasons. You can play the autobiography game, with some stories touching on electroshock therapy, suicide, and the difficulties of fitting in as an American housewife in Devon – or compare source journal entries side by side with the fiction they inspired. Ted Hughes has separated the prose into “the more successful” and the rest, and on the whole I think he has made a good call, but even the more contrived stories for women’s magazines have a lot to recommend them before their final pat twists. If you thought Sylvia Plath was just poetry and The Bell Jar, think again and investigate this collection.
