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)

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

The Informed Air

Literature by Muriel Spark

With a contribution by Penelope Jardine

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 “Hollywoodon-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.’”

Paperback(published Jan, 30 2018)

ISBN
9780811227674
Price US
15.95
Price CN
21.95
Trim Size
5.5x8.5
Page Count
304

Clothbound(published Apr, 30 2014)

ISBN
9780811221597
Price US
24.95
Page Count
352
Portrait of Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark

20th century Scottish novelist, poet and essayist

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)

Muriel Spark has written some of the best sentences in English.

The New Yorker

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

A wonderful writer.

James Wood

The most original and innovative British novelist.

The New York Review of Books