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 ...

“Remember you must die.” That’s what the characters in Muriel Spark’s first important novel hear whenever they pick up the phone. They are all old, some bedridden and others senile, and while the ...

Muriel Spark’s publishers have this year accorded her the privilege usually reserved for major writers: they have reissued her minor work, to make all available. Perilous though it be, a writer wants ...

The British novelist Muriel Spark wrote 22 novels over the course of her distinguished career, most of them quite brief and all bristling with intrigue and dark humor. Among the best of these is the ...

When I went into my Muriel Spark phase a few months back, I soon learned that she had had a When I went into my Muriel Spark phase a few months back, I soon learned that she had had a relationship ...

THE GO-AWAY BIRD (215 pp.)—Muriel Spark—Lipplncoff ($3.75). Sooner or later, readers of Muriel Spark’s fiction come to understand that they have been hornswoggled in the very nicest way. The tactics ...

Muriel Spark was a superstitious writer. In a 1971 BBC documentary, she explains her relationship with her pens. “If by accident someone picks up one of these pens … I throw that pen out the window. I ...

LIKE Jean Brodie, her greatest creation, Muriel Spark puzzled people as much as beguiling them. She was a Scottish writer who spent most of her life in self-imposed exile in Africa, New York and Italy ...

The Usher Hall, in Edinburgh, is a formal venue, principally for classical music and recitals. Inside, red carpet and panelled walls generate a very Edinburgh kind of propriety. Voices are only ever ...

But Frances Wilson isn’t buying it. In her research for Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark, the biographer found no news accounts of the murder-suicide, nor any evidence of McEwen’s birth, ...

Because we could all use a laugh. By Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs, Jennifer Szalai and Cari Vander Yacht Edinburgh calls to readers, its pearl-grey skies urging them to curl up with a book. Maggie ...