The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Author: Muriel Spark
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453245030
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 170

Book Description
“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.

The Girls of Slender Means (New Directions Classic)

Author: Muriel Spark
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811221040
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
"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."

Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Golden Samovar

Author: Olga Wojtas
Publisher: Felony & Mayhem Press
ISBN: 1631941712
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Book Description
A librarian with deceptively dangerous skills is sent back in time to Tzarist Russia in this “laugh-out-loud farce” and homage to Muriel Spark (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Never underestimate a librarian. Comfortable padded and in her middle years, Shona McMonagle may look bookish and harmless, but her education at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls has left her with a deadly expertise in everything from martial arts to quantum physics. It has also left her with a bone-deep loathing for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, that scurrilous novel that spread scandalous untruths about the finest educational institution in Edinburgh. Shona’s skills, her deceptively mild appearance, and her passionate loyalty make her the perfect recruit for an interesting new project: time travel to Tzarist Russia, prevent a gross miscarriage of romance, and—in any spare time—see to it that only the right people get murdered. It’s a big job, but no task is too daunting for a prefect from Miss Blaine’s. “A delightful addition to the ranks of comic crime.” —The Guardian, UK

Reality and Dreams

Author: Muriel Spark
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 145324509X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 157

Book Description
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

Peking Picnic

Author: Ann Bridge
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description

All the Poems of Muriel Spark

Author: Muriel Spark
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811215763
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 156

Book Description
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).

The Mandelbaum Gate

Author: Muriel Spark
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453245057
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 421

Book Description
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

Muriel Spark

Author: Martin Stannard
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 0297857789
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 433

Book Description
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.

Curriculum Vitae

Author: Muriel Spark
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811219235
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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

Loitering with Intent

Author: Muriel Spark
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811219755
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 112

Book Description
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.