The Informed Air

Essays

26 January 2018

Territory Rights — Worldwide including Canada, but excluding the British Commonwealth.

Muriel Spark (Author)

With a Preface by Penelope Jardine

Description

Now in paperback, here are the sparkling essays of Muriel Spark, the writer of “the best sentences in English” (The New Yorker

A fantastic essayist, the inimitable Muriel Spark addresses here the writing life, cats, favorite writers (the Brontës, T. S. Eliot, Robert Burns, Mary Shelley), love, Piero della Francesca, life in wartime London and in glamorous “Hollywood-on-the-Tiber” 1960s Rome, faith, and parties (on her first New Year’s Eve, as a baby sipping her mother’s sherry: “I always loved a party”).

No one was as “fearless and original” (TLS) as Muriel Spark, who believed that “art is an act of daring.” Here she glides from the mysteries of Job’s sufferings to Dame Edith Sitwell’s cocktail advice about how to handle a nasty publisher: “‘My dear,’ she said, ‘you must acquire a pair of lorgnettes, make an occasion to see that man again, focus the glasses on him and sit looking at him through them as if he was an insect. Just look and look.’” 

Reviews

"Witty, exacting, and wholly original. Muriel Spark’s writing is sui generis, her influence unquantifiable. These essays reveal in diamond-cut fragments the things that most amused and most touched her, each facet reflecting some new, surprising aspect of the deep inner workings of her mind." — Maud Newton, Salon

"Muriel’s sparky prose is the best way to start your day. Reading a blast of her prose every morning is a far more restorative way to start a day than a shot of espresso." — The Telegraph (London)

Also By: Muriel Spark View all by author...

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    A slender satirical gem from the “master of malice and mayhem” (The New York Times)
  • The Ballad of Peckham Rye

    Muriel Spark

    Paperback, 2024

    A slender satirical gem from the “master of malice and mayhem” (The New York Times)
  • Loitering with Intent

    Muriel Spark

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    Where does art start or reality end?
  • Memento Mori

    Muriel Spark

    Paperback, 2021

    Poignant, hilarious, and spooky, Memento Mori addresses old age
  • Territorial Rights

    Muriel Spark

    Paperback, 2018

    Wheels spin within wheels in Spark’s comedy of betrayals and terrorism, set in her beloved Venice

Paperback

9780811227674

127 x 198 mm • 304 pages

£12.99

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Ebook

9780811224000

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£12.99

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