KATE MOSES

Sylvia Plath's slide toward suicide at the end of 1962 is the subject of this novel, which explores the decline of her marriage and her inability to cope with the stress of her life, which included her husband's desertion, the struggle to care for her children, her fraught relations with her mother, her growing fame, and of course the constant need to write poetry.

Últimos meses de la vida de la poeta Sylvia Plath: rota su relación con el también poeta Ted Hughes, se traslada a Londres con sus hijos, llevando a cuestas sus problemas domésticos, su soledad y la oscura premonicion de la muerte. En esas terribles circunstancias que es incapar de abordar, Silvia inicia su dolorosa gestacion de los Poemas de Ariel, testimonio de un fracaso existencial que paradojicamente esta acompañado de la gloira literaria. El invierno de Sylvia no solo es el desgarrador y absorbente relato del declinar de la vida de una de las voces mas personales y profundas de la poesia actual. Es tambien una reflexion sobre las servidumbres del exito literario, sobre como la vida, el arte y el amor se conjugan con la muerte.

Últimos meses de la vida de la poeta Sylvia Plath: rota su relación con el también poeta Ted Hughes, se traslada a Londres con sus hijos, llevando a cuestas sus problemas domésticos, su soledad y la oscura premonicion de la muerte. En esas terribles circunstancias que es incapar de abordar, Silvia inicia su dolorosa gestacion de los Poemas de Ariel, testimonio de un fracaso existencial que paradojicamente esta acompañado de la gloira literaria. El invierno de Sylvia no solo es el desgarrador y absorbente relato del declinar de la vida de una de las voces mas personales y profundas de la poesia actual. Es tambien una reflexion sobre las servidumbres del exito literario, sobre como la vida, el arte y el amor se conjugan con la muerte.

From the author of the internationally acclaimed Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath comes a funny, touching memoir of a crummyand crumbychildhood.Growing up in the 1960s and 70s, Kate Moses was surrounded by sugar: Twinkies in the basement freezer, honey on the fried chicken, Baby Ruth bars in her fathers sock drawer. But sweetness of the more intangible variety was harder to come by. Her parents were disastrously mismatched, far too preoccupied with their mutual misery to notice its effects on their kids. A frustrated artist, Kates beautiful, capricious mother lived in a constant state of creative and marital emergency, enlisting Kate as her confidanteWere the girls, we have to stick togetherand instructing her three children to refer to her in public as their babysitter. Kates father was aloof, ambitious, and prone to blasts of withering abuse increasingly directed at the daughter who found herself standing between her embattled parents. Kate looked for comfort in the imaginary worlds of books and found refuge in the kitchen, where she taught herself to bake and entered the one realm where she was able to wield control.Telling her own story with the same lyricism, compassion, and eye for lush detail she brings to her fiction, coupled with the candor and humor she is known for in her personal essays, Kate Moses leavens each tale of her coming-of-age in Cakewalk with a recipe from her lifetime of confectionary obsession. There is the mysteriously erotic German Chocolate Cake implicated in a birds-and-bees speech when Kate was seven, the gingerbread people her mother baked for Christmas the year Kate officially realized she was fat, the chocolate chip cookies Kate used to curry favor during a hilariously gruesome adolescence, and the brownies she baked for her idol, the legendary M.F.K. Fisher, who pronounced them delicious.Filled with the abundance and joy that were so lacking in Kates youth, Cakewalk is a wise, loving tribute to life in all its sweetness as well as its bitterness and, ultimately, a recipe for forgiveness.