Download or read book Asylum written by Patrick McGrath and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-01-05 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patrick McGrath has created his most psychologically penetrating vision to date: a nightmare world rocked to its foundations by a passion of such force and intensity that it shatters the lives--and minds--of all who are touched by it. Stella Raphael, a woman of great beauty and formidable intelligence, is married to Max, a staid and unimaginative forensic psychiatrist. Max has taken a job in a huge top-security mental hospital in rural England, and Stella, far from London society, finds herself restless and bored. Into her lonely existence comes Edgar Stark, a brilliant sculptor confined to the hospital after killing his wife in a psychotic rage. He comes to Stella's garden to rebuild an old Victorian conservatory there, and Stella cannot ignore her overwhelming physical attraction to this desperate man. Their explosive affair pits them against Stella's husband, her child, and the entire institution. When the crisis comes to a head, Stella makes a decision--one that will destroy several lives and precipitate an appalling tragedy that could only be fueled by illicit sexual love. Asylum is a terrifying exploration of the extremes to which erotic obsession can drive us. Patrick McGrath brings his own dazzling blend of cool artistry and visceral engagement to this mesmerizing story of a fatal love and its unspeakably tragic aftermath. And in Stella Raphael, a woman who tears down the walls of her constricted existence to pursue a dangerous passion, he has created a character who will long be remembered for her willingness to take the ultimate risk, even if she must pay the ultimate price.
Download or read book Spider written by Patrick Mcgrath and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-08-18 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spider is gaunt, threadbare, unnerved by everything from his landlady to the smell of gas. He tells us his story in a storm of beautiful language that slowly reveals itself as a fiendishly layered construction of truth and illusion. With echoes of Beckett, Poe, and Paul Bowles, Spider is a tale of horror and madness, storytelling and skepticism, a novel whose dizzying style lays bare the deepest layers of subconscious terror.
Download or read book Trauma written by Patrick McGrath and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 2010-10-29 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as "an uncommon storyteller [with a] trademark ability to probe the layers of the human psyche," Patrick McGrath has written his most addictive and enthralling novel yet. Charlie Weir's family is comprehensively dysfunctional — abandoned by his father, his mother ravaged by that betrayal, and his brother, Walt, a successful artist, less Charlie's ally than his rival. So it's hardly surprising that he should find a vocation in psychiatry in New York City, counseling traumatized war veterans returning home from Vietnam. Agnes Magill, the sister of one damaged soldier, soon becomes Charlie's wife. But the suicide of her brother, Danny, ends the marriage, leaving Charlie to endure a corrosive loneliness even as Manhattan grows steadily more dirty and dangerous around him. Then, in the haunting aftermath of Charlie's mother's death, Agnes returns to offer him the solace that he has never been able to provide for her. Almost simultaneously, he is presented with a quite different anodyne — a volatile woman whose irresistible beauty, tinged though it is with an air of grievous suffering, jeopardizes everything he has hoped might restore his dwindling faith in his calling, his future and himself. As Charlie's hold on sanity weakens, and events conspire to send him reeling headlong toward the abyss, the themes of family, passion and madness - by now synonymous with Patrick McGrath's writing — rightly assume "the inevitability of myth," as Tobias Wolff has written of his work, in "fiction of a depth and power we hardly hope to encounter anymore." A genuine psychological thriller, Trauma is an experience at once unnerving, unsettling and utterly riveting.
Download or read book Ghost Town written by Patrick McGrath and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-12-22 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three haunting and brilliant tales from the hand of master storyteller Patrick McGrath 'Sharp and haunting ... McGrath's prose is clean, lucid and utterly transfixing' Sunday Times 'Like a latter-day Edgar Allan Poe, McGrath probes the insanity and violence lurking beneath the skin of daily life' Financial Times A man is haunted by the memory of his mother with a rope round her neck. It is the American War of Independence, and having defied the British forces occupying New York she must pay for her revolutionary activities. But fifty years on her son harbours a festering guilt for his inadvertent part in her downfall. In thrusting nineteenth-century New York, a ruthless merchant's sensitive son is denied the love of his life through his father's prejudice against the immigrants flooding into the city - and madness and violence ensue. In the wake of 9/11, a Manhattan psychiatrist treats a favoured patient reeling from the destruction of the World Trade Center, but fails to detect the damage she herself has sustained. In this trio of stunning tales from a master storyteller, Patrick McGrath excavates the layers of New York's turbulent history.
Download or read book Scientists Business and the State 1890 1960 written by Patrick J. McGrath and published by . This book was released on 2012-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientists, Business, and the State, 1890-1960
Download or read book The Grotesque written by Patrick McGrath and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-07-11 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exuberantly spooky novel, in which horror, repressed eroticism, and sulfurous social comedy intertwine like the vines in an overgrown English garden, is now a major motion picture, starring Alan Bates, Sting, and Theresa Russell.
Download or read book The Wardrobe Mistress written by Patrick McGrath and published by Random House. This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ***SHORTLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION*** From the bestselling author of Asylum, Trauma and Spider 'Ghosts of the theatre and the spectre of fascism haunt cold and grimy London in this atmospheric tale from a master of the grotesque.' Guardian JANUARY 1947. London is in ruins, there’s nothing to eat, and it’s the coldest winter in living memory. To make matters worse, Charlie Grice, one of the great stage actors of the day, has suddenly died. His widow Joan, the wardrobe mistress, is beside herself with grief. Then one night she discovers Gricey’s secret. Plunged into a dark new world, Joan realises that though fascism might hide, it never dies. Her war isn’t over after all. 'McGrath is one of the age's most elegantly accomplished divers into the human psyche . . . a master writer.' John Banville ‘McGrath is that rare yet essential thing, a writer who can expose our darkest fears without making us run away from them.' New Statesman 'Wonderfully sinister ... a delight ... you are in for a thrilling ride.' Spectator 'A brilliant evocation of the theatrical world’s seedy glamour, The Wardrobe Mistress is also a moving portrait of a woman struggling to make sense of her past and imagine a future for herself.' Sunday Times '[A] rich and highly spiced feast of a novel, even before it reaches its classically gothic McGrath climax.' Reader's Digest
Download or read book Blood and Water and Other Tales written by Patrick McGrath and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 1988 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Severed hands, dead monkeys, swarming insects, pickled body parts and menacing pygmies proliferate in this collection of short stories. They also feature ancient Southern plantations, isolated manor houses, places where ghosts like to lurk and places where spiritual and physical decay presides.
Download or read book Dr Haggard s Disease written by Patrick McGrath and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is wrong with Dr Edward Haggard? Is it a passionate love for the wife of the senior pathologist or is it something simpler? Is it a broken heart or is it Spike - the steel pin that holds his fractured hip together? By the author of Spider and The Grotesque.
Download or read book Patrick McGrath written by Sue Zlosnik and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patrick McGrath is one of Britain's foremost contemporary novelists but very little has been written about his work to date. This new book offers readings of McGrath's fiction informed by recent scholarship and evaluates his creative contribution to the continuation of the Gothic tradition into the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Patrick McGrath written by Jocelyn Dupont and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first collected volume to be entirely dedicated to the work of contemporary Anglo-American writer Patrick McGrath. It follows the international conference that was held in his presence at Perpignan University, France, in May 2011. It comprises nine chapters (as well as an introduction and an index) written by scholars specializing in Gothic and American literature, each dealing with specific aspects of McGrath’s work. The volume seeks to encompass the author’s whole literary production to date, spanning a 25-year writing career. It also features an exclusive afterword written by the author himself, who attended all the papers given during the conference with great attention and often intensely enthusiastic reactivity. The editor’s intention is twofold. The idea was first to provide a comprehensive survey of Patrick McGrath’s writing, returning to the aspects that are usually associated with the author’s work, such as his artful narrative control, his inclination for stories of “transgression and decay”, as well as his long-lasting reflexive relationship with the Gothic and the Grotesque. Yet the aim of this volume is also to open new directions for the study of McGrath’s texts, taking into account the noticeable evolution of the writer’s literary production, its growing Americanization and gradual distanciation with modes of excess. It seems that it is no longer possible to tag McGrath’s work as neo- or ‘postmodern’ Gothic. His books’ growing complexity and change of horizons call for fresh investigations. This book will be of interest to students of McGrath’s work, scholars of the Gothic and its contemporary manifestations, as well as to all academics specializing in contemporary American fiction.
Download or read book Patrick McGrath and his Worlds written by Matt Foley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-12-05 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the publication of Ghost Town (2005), a complex, globally conscious genealogy of millennial Manhattan, McGrath’s transnational status as an English author resident in New York, his pointed manipulation of British and American contexts, and his clear apprehension of imperial legacies have all come into sharper focus. By bringing together readings cognizant of this transnational and historical sensitivity with those that build on existing studies of McGrath’s engagements with the gothic and madness, Patrick McGrath and his Worlds sheds new light on an author whose imagined realities reflect the anxieties, pathologies, and power dynamics of our contemporary world order. McGrath’s fiction has been noted as parodic (The Grotesque, 1989), psychologically disturbing (Spider, 1990), and darkly sexual (Asylum, 1996). Throughout, his corpus is characterized by a preoccupation with madness and its institutions and by a nuanced relationship to the gothic. With its international range of contributors, and including a new interview with McGrath himself, this book opens up hitherto underexplored theoretical perspectives on the key concerns of McGrath’s ouevre, moving conversations around McGrath’s work decisively forward. Offering the first sustained exploration of his fiction’s transnational and world-historical dimensions, Patrick McGrath and his Worlds seeks to situate, reflect upon, and interrogate McGrath’s role as a key voice in Anglophone letters in our millennial global moment.
Download or read book The OCD Answer Book written by Patrick McGrath and published by Sourcebooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At any one time at least five million people in the United States are experiencing the symptoms of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), a mental disorder defined by recurrent, unwelcome thoughts (obsessions) and repetitive behaviors (compulsions) that OCD sufferers feel driven to perform. The OCD Answer Book is an authoritative reference for these adults and their loved ones, providing sound advice and immediate answers to their most pressing questions. -What is an obsession? -What is a compulsion? -Is it possible to "grow out" of OCD? -Does OCD run in families? -What increases my risk for OCD? -If I check something several times does that mean that I suffer from OCD? -I heard that OCD and strep throat might be related to each other. Is that true? Written by an experienced psychologist in an easy-to-read Q&A format, The OCD Answer Book helps readers and their loved ones cope with OCD, conquer their fears, and seek therapy when necessary.
Download or read book Port Mungo written by Patrick McGrath and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 2011-01-21 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During their privileged, eccentric English childhood, Jack Rathbone enjoyed the unstinting adoration of his sister, Gin. So when both are art students in London, it is wrenching for her to watch him fall under the spell of Vera Savage, a flamboyant and reckless painter from Glasgow. Jack and Vera run off to New York City within weeks of meeting, and from a bruised, bereft distance Gin follows their progress south through Miami and pre-revolutionary Havana to Port Mungo, a seedy town in the mangrove swamps of Honduras. There, in an old banana warehouse, Jack obsessively devotes himself to his canvases while Vera succumbs to a chronic restlessness that not even the birth of two daughters can subdue. Passion, narcissism, and the relentless demands of creativity hold these riveting characters in thrall, and McGrath skilfully evokes a feverish world of tropical impulses and artistic ambition that leads ultimately to dark secrets and to death.
Download or read book Constance written by Patrick McGrath and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-05-22 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed Costa-shortlisted author of Trauma and Asylum brings us a masterful novel of psychological suspense and marriage in 1960s America
Download or read book Last Days in Cleaver Square written by Patrick McGrath and published by Hutchinson. This book was released on 2022-02-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is 1975 and an old man, Francis McNulty, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, is beset with sightings in his garden of his old nemesis, General Franco. The general is in fact in Spain, on his deathbed, but Francis is deeply troubled, as is his daughter Gillian, who lives with him in Cleaver Square. Francis' account of his haunting is by turns witty, cantankerous and nostalgic. At times he drifts back to his days in Madrid, when he rescued a young girl from a burning building and brought her back to London with him. There are other, darker events from that time, involving an American surgeon called Doc Roscoe, and a brief, terrible act of betrayal. When Gillian announces her forthcoming marriage to a senior civil servant, Francis realizes he has to adapt to new circumstances and confront his past once and for all. Highly atmospheric, and powerfully dramatic, rich in pathos and humour, Last Days in Cleaver Square confirms a major storyteller at the height of his powers. '[W]onderfully sinister ... a delight ... you are in for a thrilling ride.' Spectator on The Wardrobe Mistress.
Download or read book Darkness Falls from the Air written by Nigel Balchin and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 2015-09-10 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic novel of the London Blitz, DARKNESS FALLS FROM THE AIR captures the chaos, absurdity and ultimately the tragedy of life during the bombardment. Featured on BACKLISTED podcast Bill Sarratt is a civil servant working on the war effort. Thwarted at every turn by bureaucracy and the vested interests of big business, the seemingly unflappable Bill is also on the verge of losing his wife Marcia to a literary poseur named Stephen. As the bombs continue to fall, Bill must decide whether he his willing to compromise his principles and prevent his life from crumbling before his very eyes.
