Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles.
From precious rediscoveries to gender-playful fictions, futurist fables to uncanny imaginings, here are stories by a new generation of Faber authors alongside Faber classics.
Faber 90th Stories brings together some of our finest short stories, past, present and future.

Lips the colour of blood, the sun an unprecedented orange, train wheels that sound like 'guilt, and guilt, and guilt': these are just some of the things Mary Ventura begins to notice on her journey to the ninth kingdom. 'But what is the ninth kingdom?' she asks a kind-seeming lady in her carriage. 'It is the kingdom of the frozen will,' comes the reply. 'There is no going back.' Sylvia Plath's strange, dark tale of independence over infanticide, written not long after she herself left home, grapples with mortality in motion.

Vorwort
Faber 90th Stories brings together some of our finest short stories, past, present and future.

Autorentext
Sylvia Plath (1932-63) 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). Her Collected Poems, which contains her poetry written from 1956 until her death, was published in 1981 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.