Emotionally charged with an exceptional poetic gift, Sylvia Plath was a woman shadowed by a dark and very private pain that could only be released through death. Her suicide would harrow and haunt three people: her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, freed by her demise and then imprisoned by her myth; Assia Gutmann Wevill, Plath’s rival and Hughes’s mistress, who kills herself only six years after Plath; and Robert Anderson, a young New York writer who reveals that Plath’s poems and her suicide “forged my identity and, incidentally, ruined my life.” Their lives intersect, transiently and directly, through some of the more dramatic social upheavals of the past decades.

Crackling with wit and verbal dexterity, Little Fugue is a stunning novel of artists caught between the erotic allure of extinction and the eternal power of poetry.

“A disarmingly original book . . . proving that Plath’s story is worth telling yet again.”

People

“Beautiful and breathtaking . . . a soulful, passionate, and profound novel.”

Dan Chaon, author of You Remind Me of Me and Among the Missing

“Hugely satisfying . . . stylistically dazzling.”

The New York Observer

Acclaimed short-story writer and winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award, Robert Anderson has written a brilliantly inventive first novel-a book that blends the facts of a famous writer's life with the profound effect of her death on an entire generation.

Sylvia Plath'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, Plath's rival and Hughes's mistress, who kills herself only six years after Plath; and Robert Anderson, a young New York writer, who is obsessed with Plath's poems and her suicide, which "forged my identity and, incidentally, ruined my life."

Their lives intersect, transiently and directly, through some of the more dramatic social upheavals of the past decades: the '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.

"From the Hardcover edition.

ROBERT ANDERSON was born in Rapid City, South Dakota, in 1964. He grew up outside of Minneapolis and attended the University of Minnesota. He came to New York in 1986 and lived for many years in Times Square residential hotels–the Vigilant, the Woodward, and the St. James–while working as a cook and writing. His first book, the short-story collection Ice Age, won the University of Georgia Press’s Flannery O’Connor Award in 2000.

From the Hardcover edition.