Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel

Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel

Wilson, Frances
Vickers, Sara

Audio Book

Literary FiguresLiterary CriticismFiction Anthologies

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN13: 9798228660441
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Published: Sep 23 2025
Language: English
Is the story fact? Is it fiction? It is what it is. --Muriel Spark

The word most commonly used to describe Muriel Spark is puzzling. Spark was a puzzle, and so too are her books. She dealt in word games, tricks, and ciphers; her life was composed of weird accidents, strange coincidences, and spooky events. Evelyn Waugh thought she was a saint, Bernard Levin said she was a witch, and she described herself as Muriel the Marvel with her X-ray eyes. Following the clues, riddles, and instructions Spark planted in her biographies, fiction, autobiography, and archives, Frances Wilson aims to crack her code.

Electric Spark explores not the celebrated Dame Muriel but the apprentice mage. We return to her early years when everything was piled on: divorce, madness, murder, espionage, poverty, skullduggery, blackmail, love affairs, revenge, and a religious conversion. If this sounds like a novel by Spark, it is because the experiences of the 1940s and 1950s became the material of her art.

As good a critic as she is a biographer [and] as sharp a stylist as she is a reader (The Boston Globe), Wilson brings her powers to bear on one of the most formidable writers of the twentieth century.

3 different editions

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