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At the staid Marcia Blaine School for Girls, in Edinburgh, Scotland, teacher extraordinaire Miss Jean Brodie is unmistakably, and outspokenly, in her prime. She is passionate in the application of her unorthodox teaching methods, in her attraction to the married art master, Teddy Lloyd, in her affai... More

Muriel Spark's bracingly salty memoir is a no-holds-barred trip through an extraordinary writer's life. It is no surprise that one of Muriel Spark's most lively and entertaining works would be her own memoir, Curriculum Vitae. Born to a Scottish Jewish father and an English Presbyterian mother, Spar... More

Poignant, hilarious, and spooky, Memento Mori addresses old age In late 1950s London, something uncanny besets a group of elderly friends: an insinuating voice on the telephone reminds each: Remember you must die. Their geriatric feathers are soon thoroughly ruffled, and many an old unsavory secret ... More

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 ... More

Household servants and accidental guests must wait out the orders of the lords of the house: not to disturb. A winter's night; a luxurious mansion near Geneva; a lucrative scandal. The first to arrive is the secretary dressed in furs with a bundle of cash, then the Baron, and finally the Baroness. T... More

The fraying fringes of 1950s literary London Rich and slim, the celebrated author Nancy Hawkins takes us in hand and leads us back to her threadbare years in postwar London, where she spends her days working for a mad, near-bankrupt publisher ("of very good books") and her nights dispensing advice a... More

A slender satirical gem from the "master of malice and mayhem" (The New York Times) The Ballad of Peckham Rye is a wickedly farcical tale of an English factory town turned upside-down by a Scot who may or may not be in league with the Devil. Dougal Douglas is hired to do "human research" into the li... More

Spark's very British bachelors come in every stripe First found contentedly chatting in their London clubs, the cozy bachelors (as any Spark reader might guess) are not set to stay cozy for long. Soon enough, the men are variously tormented -- defrauded or stolen from, blackmailed or pressed to atte... More

"All homage to Muriel Spark, the coolest writer ever to scald your liver and your lights" (The Washington Post). The Public Image, which the author has called "an ethical shocker," provides a scalding the reader is unlikely to forget, particularly as it is so enjoyable. Spark chooses Rome, "the moth... More

Eight spooky stories from the mistress of the unexpected. I aim to startle as well as please," Muriel Spark has said, and in these eight marvelous ghost stories she manages to do both to the highest degree. As with all matters in the hands of Dame Muriel her spooks are entirely original. A ghost in ... More

An election is held at the abbey of Crewe and the new lady abbess takes up her high office with implacable serenity. This is a satirical fantasy about ecclesiastical and other kinds of politics. The author has also written The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Girls of Slender Means.... More

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). In the seventy-three poems collected here Muriel Spark works in open forms as well as villanelles, rondels,... More

Spark's mind-bogglingly stunning 1957 debut With easy, sunny eeriness, Spark lights up the darkest things: blackmail, a drowning, nervous breakdowns, a ring of smugglers, a loathsome busybody, a diabolic bookseller, human evil.... More

A suspense novel about three castaways marooned on an island owned by an eccentric recluse. January Marlow, a heroine with a Catholic outlook of the most unsentimental stripe, is one of three survivors out of twenty-nine souls when her plane crashes, blazing, on Robinson's island. Presumed dead for ... More

Dame Muriel Spark delivers a delightfully alarming novel, full of high society and low cunning. One October evening five posh London couples gather for a dinner party, enjoying "the pheasant (flambe in cognac as it is)" and waiting for the imminent arrival of the late-coming guest Hilda Damien, who ... More

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 care... More

This book probes with impeccable skill and consummate artistry the halcyon years of a fiercely independent and unorthodox school teacher and her relationship with 6 favorite pupils.... More

The Driver's Seat, Spark's own favorite among her many novels, was hailed by the New Yorker as "her spiny and treacherous masterpiece." Driven mad by an office job, Lise flies south on holiday -- in search of passionate adventure and sex. In this metaphysical shocker, infinity and eternity attend Li... More

Celebrate the immortal Muriel Spark’s hundredth birthday by imbibing a delicious glass of her bubbly wit A Good Comb, a small gift edition of Muriel Spark’s brilliant asides, sayings, and aphorisms, is a book for sheer enjoyment. No writer offers such lively, pointed, puckish insights: “Neurotics a... More

Together for the first time in one sparkling, delicious volume, here are the greatest essays of Muriel Spark A fantastic essayist, the inimitable Muriel Spark addresses here the writing life; love; cats; favorite writers (T. S. Eliot, Robert Burns, the Brontës, Mary Shelley); Piero della Francesca; ... More

"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 wind... More

Set in Edinburgh in the 1930s, this is the story of an eccentric Edinburgh teacher who inspires cult like reverence in her young students, and her special, and ultimately dangerous, relationship with six of her protégés. Exploring themes of innocence, betrayal, and cold rationality opposed to unchec... More

Muriel Spark’s timeless classic about a controversial teacher who deeply marks the lives of a select group of students in the years leading up to World War II “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... More

This book is a fictional retrospective first-person narrative in which the narrator recalls events which took place in 1954 and 1955 from the vantage point of 1980s. The backdrop for the story is the London publishing scene, especially its eccentric fringe. The plot is laced with a mystery involving... More

For Barbara Vaughn, a checkpoint between Jordan and the newly formed Israel is the threshold to painful self-discovery Barbara 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... More