书名：The Bell Jar 钟形罩
难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数1140
作者：Sylvia Plath西尔维娅·普拉斯
出版社名称：Harper Perennial 
出版时间：2005
语种：英文
ISBN：9780060837020
商品尺寸：13.5 x 1.7 x 20.3 cm
包装：平装
页数：244

The Bell Jar《钟形罩》是美国自白派著名女诗人西尔维娅·普拉斯在其死前三周发表了自传体小说，也是她唯一的一部长篇小说，被美国文学界视为当代文学经典。在这本自传体小说中普拉斯以热烈直白的语言袒露她的激情与痛苦，以及那个如钟罩般笼罩着这个天才的悲剧宿命。
推荐理由：
1.普利策奖得主普拉斯的精神历程自白，风靡20世纪60年代的美国校园，至今畅销不衰；
2.小说忠实地记录了一个女人在男权社会令人窒息的“钟形罩”中孤独、绝望与挣扎的心灵历程；
3.文字表达流畅诗意，简洁传神，毫无故弄玄虚之处，小说的开头也被奉为经典之作；
4.本版本为Harper Perennial推出的英文版，另附16页作者生平事迹、访谈等内容，帮助读者深入了解创作背景；
The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under -- maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther’s breakdown with such intensity that Esther’s insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has madeThe Bell Jar a haunting American classic.
This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
Review
“Esther Greenwood’s account of her years in the bell jar is as clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing... [This] is not a potboiler, nor a series of ungrateful caricatures: it is literature.”—New York Times
“The first-person narrative fixes us there, in the doctor’s office, in the asylum, in the madness, with no reassuring vacations when we can keep company with the sane and listen to their lectures.”—Book World
“The narrator simply describes herself as feeling very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel. The in-between moment is just what Miss Plath’s poetry does catch brilliantly—the moment poised on the edge of chaos.”— Christian Science Monitor

The Bell Jar《钟形罩》以作者早年生活经历为蓝本，叙述了19岁的大二女生埃斯特·格林伍德经历了充当某知名杂志社的客座编辑、参加写作班被拒、自杀未遂、接受心理治疗、重树自信期待返回社会，展开新生活的一系列过程。本文从“榜样缺失”的角度出发，结合当时美国的实际，探讨埃斯特作为女性，在其成长过程中男性社会压抑下所产生的孤独、绝望与挣扎的心灵历程以及反抗的必然性。
A vulnerable young girl wins a dream assignment on a big-time New York fashion magazine and finds herself plunged into a nightmare. An autobiographical account of Sylvia Plath’s own mental breakdown and suicide attempt, The Bell Jar is more than a confessional novel, it is a comic but painful statement of what happens to a woman’s aspirations in a society that refuses to take them seriously... a society that expects electroshock to cure the despair of a sensitive, questioning young artist whose search for identity becomes a terrifying descent toward madness.

西尔维娅·普拉斯（Sylvia Plath，1932—1963），出生于美国马萨诸塞州的波士顿地区，8岁丧父，和弟弟一起由母亲抚养长大，生性敏感，很小就有自杀情结，短短一生中多次试图了结生命，终于1963年2月11日在伦敦寓所以煤气中毒的方式自绝于世。她是具有重要影响的美国“自白派”诗歌代表诗人、作家，被认为是继艾米莉·狄金森和伊丽莎白·毕肖普之后重要的美国女诗人。生前出版有诗集《巨人及其他诗歌》和自传体长篇小说《钟形罩》；去世后，其丈夫特德·休斯整理出版了普拉斯的诗集《爱丽尔》《渡湖》《冬树》及《西尔维娅·普拉斯诗全集》等，进一步确立了普拉斯作为一名重要诗人的地位，使其文学影响不断扩大，在其去世近20年后的1982年，普拉斯因“改变美国诗歌的创作方向”被授予普利策诗歌奖。
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied at Smith College. In 1955 she went to Cambridge University on a Fulbright scholarship, where she met and later married Ted Hughes. She published one collection of poems in her lifetime,The Colossus (1960), and a novel,The Bell Jar(1963). HerCollected Poems, which contains her poetry written from 1956 until her death, was published in 1981 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. I’m stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that’s all there was to read about in the papers—goggle—eyed headlines staring up at me at every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.
I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.
New York was bad enough. By nine in the morning the fake, country-wet freshness that somehow seeped in overnight evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream. Mirage-gray at the bottom of their granite canyons, the hot streets wavered in the sun, the car tops sizzled and glittered, and the dry, cindery dust blew into my eyes and down my throat.
I kept hearing about the Rosenbergs over the radio and at the office till I couldn’t get them out of my mind. It was like the first time I saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward,the cadaver’s head—or what there was left of it—floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and behind the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadaver’s head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.