The Informed Air: Essays

Download or read book The Informed Air: Essays written by Muriel Spark and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback, here are the sparkling essays of Muriel Spark, the writer 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 “Hollywood-on-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.’”