La campana de cristal

A new edition of Sylvia Plath's iconic novel, with an unreleased translation by Eugenia Vázquez Nacarino and a prologue by Aixa de la Cruz, offering a new reading amidst the ebb of the most recent feminist wave.

"I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart.

I am, I am, I am."

This is the story of a girl who has everything a young woman could desire in 1950s New York: a promising career, a medical student suitor, and an entire life ahead of her. Esther Greenwood has won a scholarship to work at a fashion magazine in the big city and feels that she can finally fulfill her dream of being a writer. But amidst cocktails, parties, and piles of manuscripts, she discovers a society that repudiates women's aspirations, and her life begins to unravel. Esther – the author's alter ego – withdraws into herself, as if trapped in a bell jar: continuously breathing the same stale air with no possibility of escape.

More than fifty years after its original publication, The Bell Jar has become a modern classic, and Plath's words, with Eugenia Vázquez Nacarino's new translation, retain all their impact. This iconic work, as Aixa de la Cruz states in the prologue, "travels to the present like an electric current and challenges us directly, without intermediaries."

Critics have said...
"Sylvia Plath is no ordinary genius; her warm shadow surrounds the throats of thousands of readers, aspiring poets, and teenagers who want to be like her: beautiful, strong, brutal [...]. Plath is a myth, yes. Plath is a muse. Plath is a brand that presides over our bookshelves."
Luna Miguel

"Sylvia Plath's painfully graphic roman à clef, in which a woman struggles for her own identity against social pressure, is an essential text in Anglo-American feminism."
The Guardian

"It holds its power after five decades."
The Telegraph

"Sylvia Plath became for many people an extra-literary figure, a heroine of contradictions: someone who faced horror, with which she was able to create something, but which also destroyed her."
The New Yorker

"This novel contemplates the madness of the world and the world of madness, forcing us to consider the great question posed in all truly realistic fiction: what is reality and how can we face it?"
The New York Times Books Review