One summer night in 1930, Judge Joseph Crater steps into a New York City cab and is never heard from again. Behind this great man are three women, each with her own tale to tell: Stella, his fashionable wife, the picture of propriety; Maria, their steadfast maid, indebted to the judge; and Ritzi, hi[...]

When Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters was published in 1998, it was greeted with astonishment and acclaim, immediately landing on the bestseller list. Few suspected that Hughes had been at work for a quarter of a century on this cycle of poems addressed to his first wife, Sylvia Plath. In Ariel's Gift,[...]

This complete primer on San Francisco Bay is a multifaceted exploration of an extraordinary, and remarkably resilient, body of water. Bustling with oil tankers, laced with pollutants, and crowded with forty-six cities, the bay is still home to healthy eelgrass beds, young Dungeness crabs and sharks,[...]

Revised dissertation--Princeton University, 2010.

When Adam Freedman -- a skinny, awkward, inexperienced teenager from Piedmont, California -- goes to stay with his older sister Casey in New York City, he is hopeful that his life is about to change. And it sure does. It is the summer of 2006. Gay marriage and transgender rights are in the air, and [...]

Upon the publication of her posthumous volume of poetry, "Ariel", in the mid-1960s, Sylvia Plath became a household name. In addition to the facsimile pages of Sylvia Plath's manuscript, this edition also includes in facsimile the working drafts of the title poem "Ariel" in order to offer a sense of[...]

Upon the publication of her posthumous volume of poetry Ariel in 1965, Sylvia Plath became a household name. Readers may be surprised to learn that the draft of Ariel left behind by Plath when she died in 1963 is different from the volume of poetry eventually published to worldwide acclaim.This facs[...]

A cherished part of his oeuvre, the 'Ariel Poems' of T. S. Eliot were originally commissioned for a pamphlet series of the same name that first ran between 1927 and 1931. ('Nobody else seemed to want the title afterward,' said Eliot of the series, 'so I kept it for myself'). That pamphlet series inv[...]

Jan Morris is one of the great British writers of the post-war era. Soldier, journalist, writer about places (rather than 'travel writer'), elegist of the British Empire, novelist, she has fashioned a distinctive prose style that is elegant, fastidious, supple, and sometimes gloriously gaudy. For ma[...]