Miss Muriel and Other Stories
Miss Muriel and Other Stories

Author: Ann Petry

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2017-07-15

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0810135574

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A young black girl watches as her aunt’s multiple suitors disrupt her family’s privacy. The same girl, now on the cusp of adulthood, shares her family’s growing fears that her father has disappeared. Acclaimed author Ann Petry penned these and the other unforgettable narratives in Miss Muriel and Other Stories more than seventy years ago, yet in them contemporary readers recognize characters who exist today and dilemmas that recur again and again: the reluctance of African Americans to seek help from the police, the rage that erupts in a black man worn down by brutality, the tyranny that the young can visit on their elders regardless of race. Originally published between 1945 and 1971, Petry’s stories capture the essence of African American experience since the 1940s.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Author: Muriel Spark

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2012-03-20

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 1453245030

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“A perfect book”—and basis for the Maggie Smith film—about a teacher who makes a lasting impression on her female students in the years before World War II (Chicago Tribune). “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 at the conservative Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh. Brodie selects six favorite pupils to mold—and she doesn’t stop with just their intellectual lives. She has a plan for them all, including how they will live, whom they will love, and what sacrifices they will make to uphold her ideals. When the girls reach adulthood and begin to find their own destinies, Jean Brodie’s indelible imprint is a gift to some, and a curse to others. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is Spark’s masterpiece, a novel that offers one of twentieth-century English literature’s most iconic and complex characters—a woman at once admirable and sinister, benevolent and conniving. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Muriel Spark including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s archive at the National Library of Scotland.

Loitering with Intent
Loitering with Intent

Author: Muriel Spark

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2014-05-27

Total Pages: 112

ISBN-13: 0811219755

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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 — or poor fools ensnared by a blackmailer? When the association’s pompous director steals Fleur’s manuscript, fiction begins to appropriate life.

All the Stories of Muriel Spark
All the Stories of Muriel Spark

Author: Muriel Spark

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 9780811214940

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Four brand new tales are now added to New Directions' original 1997 cloth edition of Open to the Public.

Reality and Dreams
Reality and Dreams

Author: Muriel Spark

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2012-03-20

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 145324509X

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DIVDIV“Sleek and suggestive . . . [Reality and Dreams] is so smart and seductive that you fail to notice how completely you’ve accepted a world gone utterly awry.” —Kirkus Reviews /divDIV/divDIVBritish film director Tom Richard won acclaim for his moments of pure creative inspiration. But when Richard is hospitalized after toppling from a crane during a shoot, he awakes not knowing what is real and what is not—and with no idea who to trust. Soon his wife, children, and friends are all undergoing crises of their own, from the breakup of a marriage to the loss of a job. As Richard fights to regain his health and stay centered amid the swirling chaos of his personal life, he must also wrest control of his film—his most prized pursuit—from those who seek to take it away./divDIV /divDIVWitty andengrossing, Reality and Dreams is a whiplash ride through the highs and lows of the creative process./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Muriel Spark including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s archive at the National Library of Scotland./divDIV /divDIV/div/div

Ann Petry's Short Fiction
Ann Petry's Short Fiction

Author: Hazel A. Ervin

Publisher: Praeger

Published: 2004-05-30

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13:

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This collection of critical essays is the first work to examine the short stories of Ann Petry, a noted African American writer. While best known for her best-selling debut novel, The Street, the focus of this text is her equally important, but less familiar, volume of short stories Miss Muriel and Other Stories. Within Ann Petry's Short Fiction: Critical Essays, contributors from a variety of disciplines, from literary studies to philosophy, analyze and comment on stories such as Mother Africa, In Darkness and Confusion, and The Witness. Organized into three parts, the first section provides an overview of Petry's short fiction from different theoretical perspectives. In the following two segments, essays are arranged in chronological order, beginning with Petry's work from the 1940s. Contributors discuss her portrayal of characters and conflict as well as thematic threads that run through Petry's work. Taken together, these 14 essays constitute an invaluable companion to Petry's work. This illuminating collection will interest scholars of literature, history, and culture, as well as anyone interested in the fiction of Ann Petry.

The Street
The Street

Author: Ann Petry

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2013-08-23

Total Pages: 447

ISBN-13: 0547525346

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WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION FROM NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHOR TAYARI JONES “How can a novel’s social criticism be so unflinching and clear, yet its plot moves like a house on fire? I am tempted to describe Petry as a magician for the many ways that The Street amazes, but this description cheapens her talent . . . Petry is a gifted artist.” — Tayari Jones, from the Introduction The Street follows the spirited Lutie Johnson, a newly single mother whose efforts to claim a share of the American Dream for herself and her young son meet frustration at every turn in 1940s Harlem. Opening a fresh perspective on the realities and challenges of black, female, working-class life, The Street became the first novel by an African American woman to sell more than a million copies.

Country Place
Country Place

Author: Ann Petry

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2019-04-15

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0810139774

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Originally published in 1947, Ann Petry’s classic Country Place depicts a predominantly white community disillusioned by the indignities and corruption of small-town life. Johnnie Roane returns from four years of military service in World War II to his wife, Glory. They had been married just a year when he left Lennox, Connecticut, where both their families live and work. In his taxi ride home, Johnnie receives foreboding hints that all has not been well in his absence. Eager to mend his fraying marriage, Johnnie attempts to cajole Glory to recommit to their life together. But something sinister has taken place during the intervening years—an infidelity that has not gone unnoticed in the superficially placid New England town. Accompanied by a new foreword from Farah Jasmine Griffin on the enduring legacy of Petry’s oeuvre, Country Place complicates and builds on the legacy of a literary celebrity and one of the foremost African American writers of her time.

The Ballad of Peckham Rye
The Ballad of Peckham Rye

Author: Muriel Spark

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 2014-05-27

Total Pages: 101

ISBN-13: 0811221334

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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 lives of the workers, Douglas stirs up mutiny and murder.