Culture (Free subscription) | 30/11/2009
Writing in the Telegraph over the weekend, Nicholas Shakespeare turned his attention to the biography of Muriel Spark published earlier this year. It was written by Martin Stannard, who has also been responsible for a rather dull book about Evelyn Waugh. (For a good one, turn to Selina Hastings’s scrupulously researched masterpiece or even, at [...]
Conversational Reading (Free subscription) | 25/11/2009
... germs. Among modern and postmodern writers, Beckett, Nabokov, Richard Yates, Thomas Bernhard, Muriel Spark, Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, and David Foster Wallace have all employed and impaled cliché in their work. Paul Auster is probably America’s best-known postmodern novelist; his “New York Trilogy” must have been read by thousands who do not usually read avant-garde fiction. Auster...
read_warbler (Free subscription) | 20/11/2009
... Cather and a few slightly more contemporary ones such as Truman Capote, John Updike, Alice Munro, Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Bowen etc. Anyway, thanks again, Pat, for my wonderful surprise package. It and the contents put a huge smile on my face and you can rest assured my new owls (I need to think of names now) have lots of company on my book shelves.
New Statesman (Free subscription) | 19/11/2009
Return to: | | Cheever:?a?Life By Blake BaileyReviewed by - 19 November 2009 Suburban legendOver the course of two unwieldy books, A Tragic Honesty: the Life and Work of Richard Yates and now Cheever: a Life, Blake Bailey has established himself as the most diligent biographer around. Martin Stannard, in his recent biography of Muriel Spark, enlightened readers with the knowledge that...
santiago's dead wasp (Free subscription) | 17/11/2009
... 1970s, with his radical Anglo-American poetics. [This is actually in the middle of a section about Muriel Spark's editorship.] Several editors of the Poetry Review, including Mottram and later Peter Forbes, strenuously avoided little-Englandism, and there’s a reasonable showing of Americans and Europeans here, including Brodsky, Ginsberg, Ashbery and Primo Levi. A more informative...
H. C. Newton's White Noise (Free subscription) | 04/11/2009
... right words and sentences just do not coming pouring out like ticker tape most of the time. Now, Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every morning--sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away, humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might hope for bad things to rain down on a person like this. For...
Some books what I have read (Free subscription) | 28/10/2009
Title: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Author: Muriel Spark Number of pages: 128 Started: 27 October 2009 Finished: 28 October 2009 Opening words: The boys, as they talked to the girls from Marcia Blaine School, stood on the far side of their bicycles holding the handlebars, which established a protective fence of bicycle between the sexes, and the impression that at any moment the boys...
Another 52 Books (Free subscription) | 30/10/2009
Originally published in 2 parts, in April and May 2004. Book 14 in my first 52 books challenge. Author: Muriel Spark Published: 1961 Where got: second hand shop Genre: Literature, satire I seem to have a knack for choosing books that have been made into movies. I wonder why? This week's choice was made into a memorable, if rather stagy, movie, starring the wonderful Maggie Smith. SPOILERS...
Boulton (Free subscription) | 27/10/2009
Spotted this morning - Alan Johnson arriving at cabinet clutching a copy of Muriel Spark's The Girls Of Slender Means. Appropriate reading material on the day the Government announce plans for dealing with spiralling credit card debt. And, given the debt crisis the NATION faces, one wonders if he'll lend it to the PM once he's done... Suggestions in the comments for other books Mr Brown...
The Independent (Free subscription) | 01/11/2009
... a world of tweedy saloon-bar glamour, still of the 1950s, as chronicled by Kingsley Amis and early Muriel Spark. To today's eyes, the idea of a teenage girl bedazzled by such genteel fustiness is so fascinatingly incongruous that it's a shame for the film to overstate its case by also pandering to our idea of period cool, in a nightclub scene complete with a sultry chanteuse. Otherwise,...
