Patrick McGrath and his Worlds
Patrick McGrath and his Worlds

Author: Matt Foley

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-12-05

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 1000763307

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Following the publication of Ghost Town (2005), a complex, globally conscious genealogy of millennial Manhattan, McGrath’s transnational status as an English author resident in New York, his pointed manipulation of British and American contexts, and his clear apprehension of imperial legacies have all come into sharper focus. By bringing together readings cognizant of this transnational and historical sensitivity with those that build on existing studies of McGrath’s engagements with the gothic and madness, Patrick McGrath and his Worlds sheds new light on an author whose imagined realities reflect the anxieties, pathologies, and power dynamics of our contemporary world order. McGrath’s fiction has been noted as parodic (The Grotesque, 1989), psychologically disturbing (Spider, 1990), and darkly sexual (Asylum, 1996). Throughout, his corpus is characterized by a preoccupation with madness and its institutions and by a nuanced relationship to the gothic. With its international range of contributors, and including a new interview with McGrath himself, this book opens up hitherto underexplored theoretical perspectives on the key concerns of McGrath’s ouevre, moving conversations around McGrath’s work decisively forward. Offering the first sustained exploration of his fiction’s transnational and world-historical dimensions, Patrick McGrath and his Worlds seeks to situate, reflect upon, and interrogate McGrath’s role as a key voice in Anglophone letters in our millennial global moment.

Asylum
Asylum

Author: Patrick McGrath

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2011-01-05

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0307764443

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Patrick McGrath has created his most psychologically penetrating vision to date: a nightmare world rocked to its foundations by a passion of such force and intensity that it shatters the lives--and minds--of all who are touched by it. Stella Raphael, a woman of great beauty and formidable intelligence, is married to Max, a staid and unimaginative forensic psychiatrist. Max has taken a job in a huge top-security mental hospital in rural England, and Stella, far from London society, finds herself restless and bored. Into her lonely existence comes Edgar Stark, a brilliant sculptor confined to the hospital after killing his wife in a psychotic rage. He comes to Stella's garden to rebuild an old Victorian conservatory there, and Stella cannot ignore her overwhelming physical attraction to this desperate man. Their explosive affair pits them against Stella's husband, her child, and the entire institution. When the crisis comes to a head, Stella makes a decision--one that will destroy several lives and precipitate an appalling tragedy that could only be fueled by illicit sexual love. Asylum is a terrifying exploration of the extremes to which erotic obsession can drive us. Patrick McGrath brings his own dazzling blend of cool artistry and visceral engagement to this mesmerizing story of a fatal love and its unspeakably tragic aftermath. And in Stella Raphael, a woman who tears down the walls of her constricted existence to pursue a dangerous passion, he has created a character who will long be remembered for her willingness to take the ultimate risk, even if she must pay the ultimate price.

Spider
Spider

Author: Patrick Mcgrath

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2015-08-18

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1501125400

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Spider is gaunt, threadbare, unnerved by everything from his landlady to the smell of gas. He tells us his story in a storm of beautiful language that slowly reveals itself as a fiendishly layered construction of truth and illusion. With echoes of Beckett, Poe, and Paul Bowles, Spider is a tale of horror and madness, storytelling and skepticism, a novel whose dizzying style lays bare the deepest layers of subconscious terror.

Blood and Water and Other Tales
Blood and Water and Other Tales

Author: Patrick McGrath

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13:

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Severed hands, dead monkeys, swarming insects, pickled body parts and menacing pygmies proliferate in this collection of short stories. They also feature ancient Southern plantations, isolated manor houses, places where ghosts like to lurk and places where spiritual and physical decay presides.

Trauma
Trauma

Author: Patrick McGrath

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2009-04-07

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1400075491

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Charlie Weir is a man who tackles other people's demons for a living. He has seen every kind of trauma during his years as a psychiatrist in New York.Yet he hasn't found a way of resolving his own conflicts, particularly the fatal mistake that caused his wife and daughter to leave him condemning him to corrosive loneliness and restless anger.Years later, he meets a beautiful but damaged woman who promises to restore his dwindling faith in both his profession and himself. But as he realizes that she has become more of a patient than a lover, events conspire to send him reeling toward the abyss. Addictive and enthralling, Trauma is Patrick McGrath's most riveting work to date.

The Wardrobe Mistress
The Wardrobe Mistress

Author: Patrick McGrath

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2017-09-07

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1473544807

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***SHORTLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION*** From the bestselling author of Asylum, Trauma and Spider 'Ghosts of the theatre and the spectre of fascism haunt cold and grimy London in this atmospheric tale from a master of the grotesque.' Guardian JANUARY 1947. London is in ruins, there’s nothing to eat, and it’s the coldest winter in living memory. To make matters worse, Charlie Grice, one of the great stage actors of the day, has suddenly died. His widow Joan, the wardrobe mistress, is beside herself with grief. Then one night she discovers Gricey’s secret. Plunged into a dark new world, Joan realises that though fascism might hide, it never dies. Her war isn’t over after all. 'McGrath is one of the age's most elegantly accomplished divers into the human psyche . . . a master writer.' John Banville ‘McGrath is that rare yet essential thing, a writer who can expose our darkest fears without making us run away from them.' New Statesman 'Wonderfully sinister ... a delight ... you are in for a thrilling ride.' Spectator 'A brilliant evocation of the theatrical world’s seedy glamour, The Wardrobe Mistress is also a moving portrait of a woman struggling to make sense of her past and imagine a future for herself.' Sunday Times '[A] rich and highly spiced feast of a novel, even before it reaches its classically gothic McGrath climax.' Reader's Digest

The Grotesque
The Grotesque

Author: Patrick McGrath

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2012-07-11

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0307822974

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This exuberantly spooky novel, in which horror, repressed eroticism, and sulfurous social comedy intertwine like the vines in an overgrown English garden, is now a major motion picture, starring Alan Bates, Sting, and Theresa Russell.

Dr. Haggard's Disease
Dr. Haggard's Disease

Author: Patrick Mcgrath

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2015-08-18

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 1501125419

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“A stormy tale of obsession…this is a haunting portrayal of a man broken by passion” (Library Journal). Dr. Edward Haggard is a lonely, pain-racked romantic, standing at the window of his house on the edge of a cliff, watching as the clouds of war draw near, and reflecting on the nature of love, death, medicine, war—but most of all on the wife of the senior pathologist, and the few brief months of bliss they shared. Shortly after the outbreak of World War II, a fighter pilot appears in Dr. Haggard’s surgery, reawakening memories of the single grand passion of Haggard’s life. For this young man is the son of the woman Haggard loved, and as the doctor becomes more and more intrigued by the bizarre changes occurring in his new patient’s body, his old passion gives way to a fresh one, a passion altogether odder, and darker, than the first. In true gothic fashion, Patrick McGrath brings to his narration of a doomed love affair and bizarre aftermath an acute erotic intensity, portraying a man whose disease is passion—disease that can exalt a man, but can also destroy him.

Port Mungo
Port Mungo

Author: Patrick McGrath

Publisher: Anchor Canada

Published: 2011-01-21

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0385673728

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During their privileged, eccentric English childhood, Jack Rathbone enjoyed the unstinting adoration of his sister, Gin. So when both are art students in London, it is wrenching for her to watch him fall under the spell of Vera Savage, a flamboyant and reckless painter from Glasgow. Jack and Vera run off to New York City within weeks of meeting, and from a bruised, bereft distance Gin follows their progress south through Miami and pre-revolutionary Havana to Port Mungo, a seedy town in the mangrove swamps of Honduras. There, in an old banana warehouse, Jack obsessively devotes himself to his canvases while Vera succumbs to a chronic restlessness that not even the birth of two daughters can subdue. Passion, narcissism, and the relentless demands of creativity hold these riveting characters in thrall, and McGrath skilfully evokes a feverish world of tropical impulses and artistic ambition that leads ultimately to dark secrets and to death.

Darkness Falls from the Air
Darkness Falls from the Air

Author: Nigel Balchin

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Published: 2015-09-10

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1474601197

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The classic novel of the London Blitz, DARKNESS FALLS FROM THE AIR captures the chaos, absurdity and ultimately the tragedy of life during the bombardment. Featured on BACKLISTED podcast Bill Sarratt is a civil servant working on the war effort. Thwarted at every turn by bureaucracy and the vested interests of big business, the seemingly unflappable Bill is also on the verge of losing his wife Marcia to a literary poseur named Stephen. As the bombs continue to fall, Bill must decide whether he his willing to compromise his principles and prevent his life from crumbling before his very eyes.