The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. by Lee Kravetz, Read by a Full Cast
Choice Historical Fiction Listening
Every Monday through Friday, AudioFile’s editors recommend the best in audiobook listening. We keep our daily episodes short and sweet, with audiobook clips to give you a sample of our featured listens.
The Last Confessions of Sylvia P., Lee Kravetz’s fictional account of Sylvia Plath and her circle of confessional poets, is wonderfully performed. Host Jo Reed and AudioFile contributor Sandi Henschel discuss a story of three notebooks containing handwritten notes of Plath’s The Bell Jar. Points of view shift between Estee, curator of a contemporary auction house; Boston Rhodes, Slyvia’s literary rival; and Ruth Barnhouse, Plath’s psychiatrist. Reed’s cultured tones provide Estee with intelligence and dignity, while Linden’s voice drips poisonously as Rhodes reveals her venomous side. Vacker’s Dr. Barnhouse is forward-thinking, determined, and sympathetic. Well-written and well-read, this is choice listening.
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Today’s episode is sponsored by Naxos AudioBooks. The Blazing World is part fiction and part feminist text in which a lady is shipwrecked and seeks to ensure that the Blazing World in which she finds herself is transformed into a Utopia – free of war, sexual discrimination and religious discord. Lucy Scott narrates this fascinating and extravagant combination of what the author herself calls ‘romancical’, ‘philosophical’ and ‘fantastical’.
