Download or read book Muriel Spark Time in her Fiction written by Linette Arthurton Bruno and published by Editions Publibook. This book was released on 2012-08-22 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Muriel Spark seems to have seen the world as a stage where all the men and women are merely players having their "moments" on the stage of life. "One's prime is the moment one was born for" she has been known to say, and it is those moments, mere spots in time, that she describes in her fiction. Old people become babes again. School-boys (or girls) grow into their prime. That is the cycle of life that can be traced throughout her work, a pattern of birth, growth, and decay that is akin to the seasons. Through the analysis of these five finely chosen novels – Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Girls of Slender Means, The Mandelbaum Gate and The Driver’s Seat – Linette Arthurton Bruno attempts to show how Muriel Spark adapts her time-structure to her theme. A great piece of work that underlines the skills of a woman considered as one of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945.
Download or read book The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie written by Muriel Spark and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-03-20 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A perfect book”—and basis for the Maggie Smith film—about a teacher who makes a lasting impression on her female students in the years before World War II (Chicago Tribune). “Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life!” So asserts Jean Brodie, a magnetic, dubious, and sometimes comic teacher at the conservative Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh. Brodie selects six favorite pupils to mold—and she doesn’t stop with just their intellectual lives. She has a plan for them all, including how they will live, whom they will love, and what sacrifices they will make to uphold her ideals. When the girls reach adulthood and begin to find their own destinies, Jean Brodie’s indelible imprint is a gift to some, and a curse to others. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is Spark’s masterpiece, a novel that offers one of twentieth-century English literature’s most iconic and complex characters—a woman at once admirable and sinister, benevolent and conniving. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Muriel Spark including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s archive at the National Library of Scotland.
Download or read book Muriel Spark written by Martin Stannard and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 2009-08-13 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long-awaited biography of one of the great writers of the twentieth century - 'a wonderful blend of scholarly fact and juicy storytelling' (Mail on Sunday). Muriel Spark ended was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Hers is a Cinderella story, the first thirty-nine years of which she presented in her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae (1992), politely blurring the intensity of her darker moments: her relations with her brother, mother, son, husband; a terrifying period of hallucinations and subsequent depression; and the disastrously misplaced love she had felt for two men she had wanted to marry, Howard Sergeant and Derek Stanford. Aged nineteen, Spark left Scotland to marry in Southern Rhodesia, escaping back to Britain on a troopship in 1944 after her divorce. Her son returned in 1945 to be brought up by her parents in Edinburgh while she established herself as a poet and critic in London. After becoming a Roman Catholic in 1954, she began a novel, The Comforters, and with Memento Mori, The Ballad of Peckham Rye and The Bachelors rose rapidly into the literary stratosphere. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), with its adaptation into a successful stage-play and film, marked her full translation into international celebrity and from that point she went to live first in New York, then Rome, and finally Tuscany where for over thirty years, until her death in 2006, she shared a house with her companion, the artist Penelope Jardine.
Download or read book Loitering with Intent written by Muriel Spark and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where does art start or reality end? Happily loitering about London, c. 1949, with the intent of gathering material for her writing, Fleur Talbot finds a job “on the grubby edge of the literary world” at the very peculiar Autobiographical Association. Mad egomaniacs writing their memoirs in advance — or poor fools ensnared by a blackmailer? When the association’s pompous director steals Fleur’s manuscript, fiction begins to appropriate life.
Download or read book Muriel Spark Time in Her Fiction written by Linette Arthurton Bruno and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2013-03-23 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Muriel Spark's preoccupation with man's inability to control his own destiny seems to be accompanied by a mischievous curiosity concerning the supernatural and a wish to delve into its secrets. Miss Brodie exerts a strange power over her pupils. There are prophetic utterances in "The Girls of Slender Means" which announce the coming of tragedy. In "The Driver's Seat" we find Lise's uncanny sixth sense and Mrs, Fiedke's prediction. In "Memento Mori" there is the strange voice on the telephone which warns the aged to remember they must die.Muriel Spark's real concern, however, is a realistic representation of life in her fiction. The better to convey the idea of life as a series of moments, Spark adapts the structure in her novels to embody moments representing the uncertainties of life. Sometimes Time follows an uninterrupted flow and nothing happens to alter its course. At other times, obstacles spring up and bring about a change in direction. Some trivial object may produce an association which sends a character's memory racing back to the past.A sympathetic obedience to the cycle of life and that of the seasons can also be traced throughout the five novels discussed, which treat respectively youth, man in his prime, death and decay which have their parallel in the seasons, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. Miss Brodie sits under the big elm in the school grounds with her girls (in the Spring of their lives) while Autumn leaves fall. The inhabitants of the Maud Long Ward are in the 'winter' of their lives. The cycles of life and of the seasons form part of the pattern which Muriel Spark imposes on her work to give it more coherence.
Download or read book The Girls of Slender Means New Directions Classic written by Muriel Spark and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1998-04-17 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions," begins The Girls of Slender Means, Dame Muriel Spark's tragic and rapier-witted portrait of a London ladies' hostel just emerging from the shadow of World War II. Like the May of Teck Club itself—"three times window shattered since 1940 but never directly hit"—its lady inhabitants do their best to act as if the world were back to normal: practicing elocution, and jostling over suitors and a single Schiaparelli gown. The novel's harrowing ending reveals that the girls' giddy literary and amorous peregrinations are hiding some tragically painful war wounds. Chosen by Anthony Burgess as one of the Best Modern Novels in the Sunday Times of London, The Girls of Slender Means is a taut and eerily perfect novel by an author The New York Times has called "one of this century's finest creators of comic-metaphysical entertainment."
Download or read book The Mandelbaum Gate written by Muriel Spark and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-03-20 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVDIVFor Barbara Vaughn, a checkpoint between Jordan and the newly formed Israel is the threshold to painful self-discovery/divDIV /divDIV/divDIVBarbara Vaughn is a scholarly woman whose fascination with religion stems partly from a conversion to Catholicism, and partly from her own half-Jewish background. When her boyfriend joins an archaeological excursion to search for additional Dead Sea Scrolls, Vaughn takes the opportunity to explore the Holy Land. But this is 1960, and with the nation of Israel still in its infancy, the British Empire in retreat from the region, and the Eichmann trials in full swing, Vaughn uncovers much deeper mysteries than those found at tourist sites. /divDIV /divDIVBoth an espionage thriller and a journey of faith, The Mandelbaum Gate won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize upon its publication, and is one of Spark’s most compelling novels./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Muriel Spark including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s archive at the National Library of Scotland./divDIV /divDIV/div/div
Download or read book Reality and Dreams written by Muriel Spark and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-03-20 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVDIV“Sleek and suggestive . . . [Reality and Dreams] is so smart and seductive that you fail to notice how completely you’ve accepted a world gone utterly awry.” —Kirkus Reviews /divDIV/divDIVBritish film director Tom Richard won acclaim for his moments of pure creative inspiration. But when Richard is hospitalized after toppling from a crane during a shoot, he awakes not knowing what is real and what is not—and with no idea who to trust. Soon his wife, children, and friends are all undergoing crises of their own, from the breakup of a marriage to the loss of a job. As Richard fights to regain his health and stay centered amid the swirling chaos of his personal life, he must also wrest control of his film—his most prized pursuit—from those who seek to take it away./divDIV /divDIVWitty andengrossing, Reality and Dreams is a whiplash ride through the highs and lows of the creative process./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Muriel Spark including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s archive at the National Library of Scotland./divDIV /divDIV/div/div
Download or read book Memento Mori written by Muriel Spark and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poignant, hilarious, and spooky, Memento Mori addresses old age In late 1950s London, something uncanny besets a group of elderly friends: an insinuating voice on the telephone reminds each: Remember you must die. Their geriatric feathers are soon thoroughly ruffled, and many an old unsavory secret is dusted off.
Download or read book Robinson written by Muriel Spark and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: January Marlow, a heroine with a Catholic outlook of the most unsentimental stripe, is one of three survivors out of twenty-nine souls when her plane crashes, blazing, on Robinson's island. Presumed dead for months, the three survivors must wait for the annual return of the pomegranate boat. Robinson, a determined loner, proves a fair if misanthropic host to his uninvited guests; he encourages January to keep a journal: as "an occupation for my mind, and I fancied that I might later dress it up for a novel. That was most peculiar, as things transpired, for I did not then anticipate how the journal would turn upon me, so that having survived the plane disaster, I should nearly meet my death through it." In Robinson, Muriel Spark's wonderful second novel, under the tropical glare and strange fogs of the tiny island, we find a volcano, a ping-pong playing cat, a dealer in occult as well as lucky charms, flying ants, sexual tension, a disappearance, blackmail, and -- perhaps -- murder.
Download or read book The Comforters written by Muriel Spark and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spark’s mind-bogglingly stunning 1957 debut With easy, sunny eeriness, Spark lights up the darkest things: blackmail, a drowning, nervous breakdowns, a ring of smugglers, a loathsome busybody, a diabolic bookseller, human evil.
Download or read book All the Stories of Muriel Spark written by Muriel Spark and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2001 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four brand new tales are now added to New Directions' original 1997 cloth edition of Open to the Public.
Download or read book Curriculum Vitae written by Muriel Spark and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Muriel Spark's bracingly salty memoir is a no-holds-barred trip through an extraordinary writer's life.
Download or read book The Ballad of Peckham Rye written by Muriel Spark and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A slender satirical gem from the “master of malice and mayhem” (The New York Times) The Ballad of Peckham Rye is a wickedly farcical tale of an English factory town turned upside-down by a Scot who may or may not be in league with the Devil. Dougal Douglas is hired to do “human research” into the lives of the workers, Douglas stirs up mutiny and murder.
Download or read book My Search for Warren Harding written by Robert Plunket and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2023-06-06 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exhilarating, brutal, comedic masterpiece—an American classic that will “leave you so giddy you’ll go and kick sand in somebody’s face” (Houston Post) When My Search for Warren Harding, Robert Plunket’s glittering story of literary sleuthing and deceit, first appeared in 1983, it garnered immediate and far-reaching acclaim. Frank Conroy at the Washington Post exclaimed, “The author pulled me in so deftly, moved me up an escalating scale of sly hyperbole so cunningly, that after a hundred pages, I seemed to have turned over the keys, so to speak, of my nervous system”; Florence King at the Dallas Times Herald, “The most exciting event in American letters for a very long time: a momentous book.” More recently, though long out of print, it was canonized in The Guardian’s “1000 Novels Everyone Must Read,” ranked by the Washington Post as one of the top five books of “great American comic fiction,” and praised by Michael Leone in the Los Angeles Review of Books as “a classic picaresque novel in the tradition of Cervantes.” Set against the fading light of early-1980s Hollywood, our deeply flawed, bigoted, closeted antihero Elliot Weiner is a historian—Harvard BA, Columbia PhD—with a passion for Morris dancing and Warren Harding, “the shallowest President in history.” After Weiner receives a research grant to write a book on the tumultuous life of Harding, he gets wind of a trunkful of the 29th president’s bawdy billets-doux that is rumored to be fiercely guarded by his ancient mistress Rebekah Kinney on her declining Hollywood Hills estate. Nothing and no one can stand in the way of Weiner getting his paws on the treasure, and along the way, as the words dance across the page, a hysterical, guffaw-inducing punchline around every corner, Weiner reaches new lows of humiliation and self-delusion.
Download or read book Aiding and Abetting written by Muriel Spark and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2002-03-12 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Aiding and Abetting, the doyenne of literary satire has written a wickedly amusing and subversive novel around the true-crime case of one of England’s most notorious uppercrust scoundrels and the “aiders and abetters” who kept him on the loose. When Lord Lucan walks into psychiatrist Hildegard Wolf’s Paris office, there is one problem: she already has a patient who says he’s Lucan, the fugitive murderer who bludgeoned his children’s nanny in a botched attempt to kill his wife. As Dr. Wolf sets about deciding which of her patients, if either, is the real Lucan, she finds herself in a fierce battle of wills and an exciting chase across Europe. For someone is deceiving someone, and it may be the good doctor, who, despite her unorthodox therapeutic method (she talks mainly about her own life), has a sinister past, too. Exhibiting Muriel Spark’s boundless imagination and biting wit, Aiding and Abetting is a brisk, clever, and deliciously entertaining tale by one of Britain’s greatest living novelists.
Download or read book A Spark in Time written by Linette Bruno and published by . This book was released on 2009-04 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Muriel Spark's success seems to spring from her skill in engaging the active involvement of the reader in her stories. Time in her narrative does not always move chronologically. The reader is made to jump from present to past to future and in the end, detective-wise, he enjoys going back to the beginning in order to put the pieces together for himself so as to get the full picture. Five of Muriel Spark's most popular novels have been put together in "A Spark in Time" to illustrate how she uses the time technique to match her themes. Together they form a mosaic which, in the end, is illustrative of her attitude to life - that great stage of life where we all play a part.
