Four brand new tales are now added to New Directions' original 1997 cloth edition of Open to the Public . This new and complete paperback edition now contains every one of her forty-one marvelous stories, catnip for all Spark fans. All the Stories of Muriel Spark spans Dame Muriel Spark's entire career to date and displays all her signature stealth, originality, beauty, elegance, wit, and shock value.No writer commands so exhilarating a style―playful and rigorous, cheerful and venomous, hilariously acute and coolly supernatural. Ranging from South Africa to the West End, her dazzling stories feature hanging judges, fortune-tellers, shy girls, psychiatrists, dress designers, pensive ghosts, imaginary chauffeurs, and persistent guests. Regarding one story ("The Portobello Road"), Stephen Schiff said in The New Yorker : "Muriel Spark has written some of the best sentences in English. For instance: 'He looked as if he would murder me, and he did.' It's a nasty piece of work, that sentence."
Available at last are all the poems by one of the twentieth century's greatest British writers, Dame Muriel Spark: "a true literary artist, acerbic and exhilarating" (London Evening Standard). In the seventy-three poems collected here Muriel Spark works in open forms as well as villanelles, rondels, epigrams, and even the tour de force of a twenty-one page ballad. She also shows herself a master of unforgettable short poems. Before attaining fame as a novelist (Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), Muriel Spark was already an acclaimed poet. The "power and control" of her poetry, as Publishers Weekly remarked, "is almost startling." With the vitality and wit typical of all her work, Dame Muriel has never stopped writing poems, which frequently appear in The New Yorker. As with all her creations, the poems show Spark to be "astonishingly talented and truly inimitable" (The San Francisco Chronicle).
Contents: - Bang-Bang You're Dead - The Gentile Jewesses - The Curtain Blown by the Breeze - The Playhouse Called Remarkable - The Ormolu Clock - The Leaf-Sweeper - The Dark Glasses - The House of the Famous Poet - A Member of the Family - Alice Long's Dachshunds - The Fathers' Daughters - The First Year of My Life
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Stories deal with childhood friends, settlers in Africa, home movies, infidelity, children, alcoholism, town life, and depression
This is a collection of four short stories taken from "The Collected Stories" of Muriel Spark: "The Portobello Road", "Bang-Bang You're Dead", "The Seraph and the Zambesi" and "The Dragon".
From the cruel irony of 'A member of the Family' to the fateful echoes of 'The Go-Away Bird' and the unexpectedly sinister 'The Girl I Left Behind Me', in settings that range from South Africa to the Portobello Road, Muriel Spark probes the idiosyncrasies that lurk beneath the veneer of human respectability, displaying the acerbic wit and wisdom that are the hallmarks of her unique talent. The Complete Short Stories is a collection to be loved and cherished, from one of the finest short story writers of the twentieth century.
Selected stories by Muriel Spark, released in association with Scotland on Sunday. Includes 'The Executor', 'Bang-Bang You're Dead', 'The Seraph and the Zambesi' and 'The Portobello Road'
Stories in the Travelman Short Stories series take the reader to places of mystery, fantasy, horror, romance, and corners of the universe yet unexplored. In turn, readers take them on the bus or subway, slip them into briefcases and lunchboxes, and send them from Jersey to Juneau. Each classic or original short story is printed on one sheet of paper and folded like a map. This makes it simple to read while commuting, convenient to carry when not, and easy to give or send to a friend. A paper envelope is provided for mailing or gift-giving, and both are packaged in a clear plastic envelope for display. The cost is not much more than a greeting card.
Eight spooky stories from the mistress of the unexpected. I aim to startle as well as please," Muriel Spark has said, and in these eight marvelous ghost stories she manages to do both to the highest degree. As with all matters in the hands of Dame Muriel her spooks are entirely original. A ghost in her pantheon can be plaintive or a bit vengeful, or perhaps may not even be aware of being a ghost at all. One in fact is the ghost of a man who isn't even dead yet. Another takes the bus home from work, believing she is still alive, though she is haunted by an odious tune stuck in her head (which her murderer had been relentlessly humming), and distressed by a "feeling of incompletion." And a reflective ghost recalls her mortal days of enjoying "the glory of the world, as if it would never pass. Spark has a flair for confiding ghosts: "I must explain that I departed this life nearly five years ago. But I did not altogether depart this world. There were those odd things still to be done which one's executors can never do properly." In her case the odd things include cheerily hailing her murderer, "Hallo George!" and driving him mad. The remarkably nonchalant stories here include some of her most wicked and famous"The Seraph and the Zambesi," "The Hanging Judge," and "The Portobello Road"and they all gleam with that special Spark sheen, the quality The Times Literary Supplement has hailed as "gloriously witty and polished."
In her foreword to All The Poems (2003) Muriel Spark wrote, ‘Although most of my life has been devoted to fiction, I have always thought of myself as a poet. I do not write “poetic” prose, but feel that my outlook on life and my perceptions of events are those of a poet.’ Including previously uncollected work, this new edition demonstrates her ear for the rightness of a line and her eye for the telling detail, her command of poetic forms and her ability to rise to the different challenges of freer verse. Spark’s poems are witty, idiosyncratic and haunting, transforming the familiar into glittering moments of strangeness, revealing the dark – and light – music beneath the mundane.