All the Stories of Muriel Spark [Paperback]

Muriel Spark (Author)

Book Description

Series: New Directions Paperbook | Publication Date: November 2001

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."

Editorial Reviews

From 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. (Nov. 29)Forecast: Following so soon on the heels of Open to the Public, this volume may not receive much review coverage, but as the first paperback collected edition since 1985, it should sell well, particularly to students and first-time Spark readers.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review

One of my special personal favorites is Muriel Spark …. Introduce her to a generation of new readers. Recommended. (Patricia A. Kossmann - America )

Dullness is as as foreign to her as inelegance. (Patricia Craig - The New Statesman )

Spark's marvelous control of ambiguities and language continues to dazzle. (Publishers Weekly )

That Spark is one of the most important voices in 20th-century British literature has, quite correctly, become an accepted truth. (Belles Lettres )

To read Spark is to encounter delight after delight. (Georgia Review )

[Spark's writing is] likely to go on being read as long as fiction in English is read at all. (The New York Times Book Review )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (November 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081121494X
• ISBN-13: 978-0811214940
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #616,731 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "We Haven't Got the Savage In Ourselves Under Control", January 3, 2006

By 

J. E. Barnes - See all my reviews

This review is from: All the Stories of Muriel Spark (Paperback)

All The Stories of Muriel Spark (2000) is the latest edition of novelist's short fiction; four stories have been added since the book was released as Open to the Public: New & Collected Stories in 1997. The new edition is fully warranted, as Spark remains one of the greatest short story writers in English of her time, a fact rarely acknowledged in the literary world.

Best known as the author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and typically designated in the press over the decades as 'the Catholic novelist' or 'the Scottish novelist,' Spark is in fact, above all, a Gnostic writer of the first order. Throughout her twenty-three novels and other works, which include drama, radio plays, criticism, autobiography, poetry, and a story for children, Spark's elegant, kinetic work--whether through first person or omniscient narrative--is guided and revealed by intuitive but accurate sudden flashes of insight and perception which reveal the fundamental truth behind appearances. Spark has said that she "doesn't go in for motives," and neither has she gone in for standard, consensus-reality 'rational' explanations. For Spark, human life and reality itself are infinitely strange and mysterious, blanketed in a perpetual "cloud of unknowing" through which keen human intelligence, however, if rightfully applied, can often successfully penetrate.

In the guise of the 'supernatural,' the mysterious plays an appropriately substantial role in Spark's short fiction. 'The Portabello Road,' 'The Leaf-Sweeper,' 'The Executor,' 'Another Pair of Hands,' and 'The Girl I Left Behind Me' are ghost stories of a kind, but certainly not horror stories in the grand British tradition of M. R. James. Arthur Machen, and Algernon Blackwood. 'The Seraph and the Zambesi' features of the unexpected arrival of a grotesque angel at an African Nativity play, while the title character in 'Miss Pinkerton's Apocalypse' is beset by a flying 'saucer'--the kind used at tea time--in her home. Weirdly toying with the literal and the figurative, Spark allows the guardian 'personal assistant' in 'The Dragon' to begin breathing actual fire to demonstrate her essential nature.

But Spark never relies on the paranormal as a crutch: 'Bang-Bang You're Dead,' 'The Twins,' 'The Pawnbroker's Wife,' 'The Ormolu Clock,' the grim 'The Dark Glasses,' and 'A Member of the Family' seamlessly reveal Spark's acute psychological understanding of the human condition.

'Come Along, Marjorie' brilliantly examines the role of faith and gnostic insight when juxtaposed with mass belief and crowd mentality, and 'The Black Madonna,' among the very best of Spark's short work, hilariously exposes the hypocrisy often inherent in progressive Protestantism. Young African citizen Daphne in 'The Go-Away Bird' finds the long-dreamt of realities of life in England to be far more precarious than playing the role of sacrificial pawn for her unsound guardians in her native country, while a manipulative power broker gets her comeuppance via a pair of tattered, uncouth garters left on public display in 'Daisy Overend.'

Often "stunned by privilege" of various kinds, many of Spark's unconsciously predatory characters live via assumption in a comfortable fog until rudely awakened by the sharp intervention of an outside agency. Though the pompous, the smug, the condescending, the pretentious, the aggressively stupid, and the power-hungry come in for particularly painful reversals, Spark is wise enough to acknowledge the basic vulnerability of all members of mankind at all times.

In Spark's vision, most individuals in positions of power are rarely deserving of them; correspondingly, the author never advocates mere passive goodness in the face of confrontational immorality. Spark protagonists, which exist more clearly in her novels, are action-oriented and self-responsible concerning their own spiritual and practical welfare. Thus, Spark's often carefully delineated 'can do' approach is one of the most exhilarating aspects of her work. One naive character innocently responds to everything she is told with "Oh, I see," but in fact sees nothing, a response which leads directly to her demise.

It isn't terribly surprising that Spark isn't more widely known or read, especially in America. Compared to the faux-sensitivity, bland style, and the very small kernels of ideas that went into most of Hemingway's work, for example, Spark is and always has been a more complex literary thoroughbred. Though a small portion of her work is creatively unsuccessful, Spark remains utterly original.

The simple truth is that, while always entertaining and often thrilling, Spark's work, regardless of its essential humanity, is often too intelligent and challenging for a mass public that continually desires a comfortable and redundant reinforcement of its basic beliefs, no matter how limiting or misguided. But like the work of William Blake, William Butler Yeats, or T. S. Elliot, Spark's oeuvre offers readers the opportunity to glimpse life anew, cleansed free of the sterile and obsolete programs of thought which hamper essential personal freedom and invaluable individual perception.

5.0 out of 5 stars Genius of Dame Muriel, December 22, 2011

By 

Carla Sarett (Radnor, PA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: All the Stories of Muriel Spark (Paperback)

Just when you thought that you know all of Muriel Spark's amazing tricks, it turns out [on the basis of these stories} that she has yet a few more up her sleeve--including ghost stories in which ghosts walk among us, or in which characters find themselves ghosts at last. The inventiveness of the language still startles.