From Publisher’s Weekly:

“The Plath/Hughes story has been told and retold almost to death, but Flannery O’Connor Award-winner Anderson (The Ice Age) breathes brash new life into the iconic tale in this hypnotic and provocative novel. Anderson chronicles the aftermath of Plath’s 1963 suicide from the perspective of real and fictional characters, notably Columbia-educated fiction writer Robert Anderson, who is forever changed by reading the Ariel poems. To him, Plath is untouchable, the sacrificial Joan of Arc. His Plath-infused account of social and political turmoil in New York from the Columbia riots of 1968 to September 11, 2001, is counterpointed by the story of Ted Hughes and his mistress, Assia Gutmann Wevill.

Although Anderson makes it keenly obvious that he favors Plath, and he will ruffle plenty of feathers with his blunt partisanship (“What a bleak, anticlimactic, eschatological PR caper that Birthday Letters charade made for… Ted made his last buck”), Ted is artfully portrayed as a man who felt he never really knew his wife. Assia, meanwhile, is the half-good poet who covets Plath’s identity and ends up sharing her fate. Anderson’s writing is electric, irreverent and erudite.”

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Ice Age
by Robert Anderson

The ten stories in Robert Anderson's debut collection are an inventive and daring foray into the world of the absurd. Leading us across a wide range of settings, from rural Texas to 1930s Spain to a Gulf War Weld hospital, Anderson shifts our view of the world to incorporate a set of characters slightly off-center and intriguing in their eccentricity. As he casts his writer's spyglass over their atypical lives, they begin to seem natural, universal, almost the norm. Anderson tempts us further to believe his sometimes harrowing vision by incorporating some well-known personalities from our time.