All the Stories of Muriel Spark
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- 9,99 €
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- 9,99 €
Publisher Description
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."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Coming just four years after the cloth edition of Open to the Public: New and Collected Stories, which introduced readers to 10 new Spark tales, this collection tacks on four slight additions and brings the total of Spark's stories to 41. The new entries are brief variations on familiar Stark themes: social standing is comically depicted in "The Snobs," the ownership of family history is probed through photographs in "A Hundred and Eleven Years Without a Chauffeur" and benign ghostly experiences account for the remaining two stories. Taken together, they're not a major inducement for owners of the 1997 collection to indulge again so soon. Those who know Spark mainly from her novels, however (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; Loitering with Intent), will be pleased to snap up this treasure trove, markedly best for the many of her earlier stories that combine elements that other writers wouldn't dare bring together. Chance encounters between strangers spiral into unexpected plots (as when a young woman meets a soldier on a train in "The House of the Famous Poet"), and Spark's narrators (including the wry, level-headed ghost of "The Portobello Road") serve as astute observers of race, class and society, particularly in the stories set in colonial South Africa. There are times when the whimsy goes screwball, and briefer pieces stemming from a word or phrase peter out, but overall Spark's marvelous control of ambiguities and language continues to dazzle.
