The Bell Jar

A new edition of Sylvia Plath's iconic novel, with an unpublished translation by Eugenia Vázquez Nacarino and a prologue by Aixa de la Cruz, offering a new reading amidst the ebb of the most recent feminist wave.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 want in 1950s New York: a promising career, a suitor studying medicine, and a whole 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 realize her dream of becoming a writer. But amidst cocktails, party nights, 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—retreats into herself, as if trapped in a bell jar: continually 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 says in the prologue, «travels to the present like an electric current and challenges us directly, without mediation».