The Girls Of Slender Means New Directions Classic

Author : Muriel Spark
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Page : 148 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 1998-04-17
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780811221047

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The Girls of Slender Means (New Directions Classic) by Muriel Spark Pdf

"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."

Author : Muriel Spark
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2014-05-27
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780811219754

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Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark Pdf

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.

Author : Muriel Spark
Publisher : Virago
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2013-05-09
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781405530460

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The Comforters by Muriel Spark Pdf

In Muriel Spark's fantastic first novel, the only things that aren't ambiguous are her matchless originality and glittering wit. Caroline Rose is plagued by the tapping of typewriter keys and the strange, detached narration of her every thought and action. She has an unusual problem - she realises she is in a novel. Her fellow characters are also possibly deluded: Laurence, her former lover, finds diamonds in a loaf of bread - could his elderly grandmother really be a smuggler? And Baron Stock, her bookseller friend, believes he is on the trail of England's leading Satanist.

Author : Kelly M. Rich
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2023-07-13
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780192645616

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The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British and Anglophone Novel by Kelly M. Rich Pdf

The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British Novel offers a new literary history of the Second World War and its aftermath by focusing on wartime visions of rebuilding Britain. Shifting attention from the "People's War" to the "People's Peace," this book shows that literature returns to the historic transition from warfare to welfare to narrate its transformative social potential and darker failures. The welfare state envisioned that managing individuals' private lives would result in a more coherent and equitable community, a promise encapsulated in the 1942 Beveridge Report's promise of care from the "cradle to the grave." The postwar novel reveals the intimate effects that follow when infrastructures of collective living seek to organize social interaction, tracing these effects through quasi-administrated home spaces such as girls' hostels, makeshift sanatoria, and experimental schools. Mid-century writers including Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark, and Samuel Selvon used the militarized Home Front to present postwar Britain as a zone of lost privacy and new collective logics. As the century progressed, and as the unrealized dreams of welfare came to be dismantled, authors including Alan Hollinghurst, Michael Ondaatje, and Kazuo Ishiguro registered an unfulfilled nostalgia for a Britain that never was, situating British domestic policies within trajectories of historic and social violence. Contemporary fiction continues to reanimate the transition from a warfare state to a welfare state, preserving its transformative potential while redefining its possible futures. With this long view of postwar fiction, this volume demonstrates the holding power of welfare's promises of repair and Britain's mid-century on the British cultural imagination.

Author : Muriel Spark
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 214 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 1981
Category : Electronic
ISBN : OCLC:908920539

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The Bachelors. (Novel. Repr.). by Muriel Spark Pdf

Author : Muriel Spark
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2003-02-17
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780811222426

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Robinson (New Directions Classic) by Muriel Spark Pdf

A suspense novel about three castaways marooned on an island owned by an eccentric recluse. 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, andperhapsmurder. Everything astounds, confounds, and convinces, frighteningly. "She is," as Charles Alva Hoyt once put it, "the Jane Austen of the Surrealists." Robinson, a unique and marvelous novel, is another display of the powers of "the most gifted and innovative British novelist" (The New York Times). In the work of Dame Murielin the last words of Robinson "immediately all things are possible."

Author : Muriel Spark
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Page : 144 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2014-05-27
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780811221337

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The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark Pdf

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.

Author : Muriel Spark
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 174 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 1982
Category : Fiction in English, 1945- - Texts
ISBN : 0140021574

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Robinson by Muriel Spark Pdf

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.

Author : Muriel Spark
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Page : 114 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 1995
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0811212963

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The Abbess of Crewe by Muriel Spark Pdf

"The short dirk in the hands of Muriel Spark has always been a deadly weapon," said The New York Times, and "never more so than in The Abbess of Crewe." An elegant little fable about intrigue, corruption, and electronic surveillance, The Abbess of Crewe is set in an English Benedictine convent. Steely and silky Abbess Alexandra (whose aristocratic tastes run to pâté, fine wine, English poetry, and carpets of "amorous green") has bugged the convent, and rigged her election. But the cat gets out of the bag, and--plunged into scandal--the serene Abbess faces a Vatican inquiry.

Author : Muriel Spark
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Page : 144 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2004-04-17
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9780811221573

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All the Poems of Muriel Spark by Muriel Spark Pdf

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).

Author : Muriel Spark
Publisher : Canongate Books
Page : 115 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2015-08-06
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781782117698

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The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark Pdf

'Muriel Spark's most celebrated novel . . . This ruthlessly and destructively romantic school ma'am is one of the giants of post-war fiction' Independent 'A brilliantly psychological fugue' Observer The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is Muriel Spark's most significant and celebrated novel, and remains as dazzling as when it was first published in 1961. Miss Jean Brodie is a teacher unlike any other, proud and cultured, enigmatic and freethinking; a romantic, with progressive, sometimes shocking ideas and aspirations for the girls in her charge. At the Marcia Blaine Academy she takes a select group of girls under her wing. Spellbound by Miss Brodie's unconventional teaching, these devoted pupils form the Brodie set. But as the girls enter their teenage years and they become increasingly drawn in by Miss Brodie's personal life, her ambitions for them take a startling and dark turn with devastating consequences.

Author : Muriel Spark
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 201 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 1970
Category : Electronic
ISBN : OCLC:249567588

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The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark Pdf

Author : Muriel Spark
Publisher : Virago Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Literature publishing
ISBN : 1844085511

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A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark Pdf

Mrs Hawkins, a comfortably large young widow, is often called upon to administer advice to colleagues and neighbours. But she follows her own advice, too, and turns from Mrs Hawkins into Nancy: quite a different proposition.

Author : Muriel Spark
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2011
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0811219232

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Curriculum Vitae by Muriel Spark Pdf

Muriel Spark's bracingly salty memoir is a no-holds-barred trip through an extraordinary writer's life.

Author : Luisa Passerini
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 1996-10-25
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0819563021

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Autobiography of a Generation by Luisa Passerini Pdf

The year 1968 is symbolic in Italy of a decade of struggles by students, women, workers, intellectuals, and technicians. This work documents the intricate web of individual and communal experiences in the political movements of the 1960s. Passerini alternates chapters based on her diaries with interviews of other participants.