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)
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.’”
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.
