Members-Only Book Club – Online

Join fellow Alliance members in the virtual sphere to explore literature – both fiction and non-fiction – revolving around art, artists, art history, and art appreciation. Participate in thoughtful group discussions and expand your appreciation and knowledge of the world of art!

The Members-Only Book Club meets from 6:30-8:30 p.m. on the third Tuesday of every month. Club members must purchase their own copy of each book, but an active Alliance membership is all that’s required. To become a member, click here.

THIS MONTH’S BOOK

Sylvia Plath Month – please choose a book:

Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath by Kate Moses • This engrossing debut novel depicts Sylvia Plath’s feverish artistic process in the bitter aftermath of her failed marriage to Ted Hughes–the few excruciating yet astoundingly productive weeks in which she wrote Ariel,” ” her defining last collection of poems. In December 1962, shortly before her suicide, Plath moved with her two children to London from the Hughes’s home in Devon. Focusing on the weeks after their arrival, but weaving back through the years of Plath’s marriage, Kate Moses imagines the poet juggling the demands of motherhood and muse, shielding her life from her own mother, and by turns cherishing and demonizing her relationship with Ted. Richly imagined yet meticulously faithful to the actual events of Plath’s life, Wintering is a remarkable portrait of the moments of bravery and exhilaration that Plath found among the isolation and terror of her depression

Last Days of Sylvia Plath by Carl Rollyson • In her last days, Sylvia Plath struggled to break out from the control of the towering figure of her husband, Ted Hughes. In the antique mythology of his retinue, she had become the gorgon threatening to bring down the House of Hughes. Drawing on recently available court records, archives, and interviews, and reevaluating the memoirs of the formidable Hughes contingent who treated Plath as a female hysteric, Carl Rollyson rehabilitates the image of a woman too often viewed solely within the confines of what Hughes and his collaborators wanted to be written.

Red Comet – The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark • Determined not to read Plath’s work as if her every act, from childhood on, was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark presents new materials about Plath’s scientist father, her juvenile writings, and her psychiatric treatment, and evokes a culture in transition in the mid-twentieth century, in the shadow of the atom bomb and the Holocaust, as she explores Sylvia’s world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her conflicted ties to her well-meaning, widowed mother; her troubles at the hands of an unenlightened mental-health industry; and her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes, a true marriage of minds that would change the course of poetry in English. Clark’s clear-eyed sympathy for Hughes, his lover Assia Wevill, and other demonized players in the arena of Plath’s suicide promotes a deeper understanding of her final days, with their outpouring of first-rate poems. Along with illuminating readings of the poems themselves, Clark’s meticulous, compassionate research brings us closer than ever to the spirited woman and visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women poets the world over.

Please note: this interactive and hands-on event is hosted online, which means you get to enjoy it from the comfort of your living room, patio or kitchen table! It will be hosted via Zoom. If you’ve never used zoom before, we suggest you take some time to familiarize yourself with the platform ahead of time and download the app. You can find everything you’ll need at Zoom.us or in the App store on your phone or tablet. An access link will be provided prior to the start of the event.