Little Fugue Book

Acclaimed short-story writer and winner of the Flannery Oâ??Connor Award, Robert Anderson has written a brilliantly inventive first novelâ??a book that blends the facts of a famous writerâ??s life with the profound effect of her death on an entire generation.Sylvia Plathâ??s legacy inspires, harrows, and haunts the three people at the center of Little Fugue: her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, freed by her death and then imprisoned by her myth; Assia Gutmann Wevill, Plathâ??s rival and Hughesâ??s mistress, who kills herself only six years after Plath; and Robert Anderson, a young New York writer, who is obsessed with Plathâ??s poems and her suicide, which â??forged my identity and, incidentally, ruined my life.â?Their lives intersect, transiently and directly, through some of the more dramatic social upheavals of the past decades: the â??68 student riots, the drug-addled seventies, the AIDS crisis of the eighties, the cataclysm of 9/11.Little Fugue crackles with wit and verbal dexterity. There have been many accounts of the Plath/Hughes drama, but author Robert Anderson provides a fresh, utterly convincing interpretation of events. This is a brilliant novel of artists caught between the erotic allure of extinction and the eternal power of poetry.Read More