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The Bachelors
Muriel Spark
€ 12.99
€ 10.74
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Description for The Bachelors
Paperback. 'I am dazzled by The Bachelors. It is the cleverest and most elegant of all Spark's clever and elegant books' Evelyn Waugh Now available in print and eBook as a gorgeous canon Series: Canons. Num Pages: 240 pages. BIC Classification: FA. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 199 x 130 x 19. Weight in Grams: 182.
The Bachelors displays the best of Sparkian satire, placing her at the heart of a great literary tradition alongside Waugh and Trollope, Wilde and Wodehouse. It demands rediscovery. 'It's easy to see why Waugh admired The Bachelors. On one level, it is a blithely carnivorous satire in the Waugh mould. The bachelors of the title - almost the only men we meet in the narrative - are the thirty-something male barristers, teachers, journalists and museum attendants of a small patch of West London. They lead inturned, doddery, superannuated lives, pottering between grocers, coffee-houses, bedsits and the houses of their mothers and aunts. But the comedy here is serious in a way that Waugh's satanically energetic comedies of misery rarely are . . . comedies of English manners have seldom been darker' Daily Telegraph 'My admiration for Spark's contribution to world literature knows no bounds. She was peerless, sparkling, inventive and intelligent - the creme de la creme' Ian Rankin 'Muriel Spark's novels linger in the mind as brilliant shards, decisive as a smashed glass is decisive' John Updike, New Yorker
Product Details
Publisher
Canongate Books Ltd
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2015
Series
Canons
Condition
New
Weight
180g
Number of Pages
240
Place of Publication
Edinburgh, United Kingdom
ISBN
9781782117551
SKU
9781782117551
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 2 to 4 working days
Ref
99-2
About Muriel Spark
Muriel Spark, DBE, C.Litt., was born in Edinburgh in 1918 and educated in Scotland. A poet and novelist, she also wrote children's books, radio plays, the comedy Doctors of Philosophy and biographies of nineteenth-century literary figures, including Mary Shelley and Emily Bronte. Muriel Spark has garnered international praise and many awards, including the David Cohen Prize for Literature, the Ingersoll T.S. Eliot Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Boccaccio Prize for European Literature, the Gold Pen Award, the first Enlightenment Award and the Italia Prize for dramatic radio. She died in 2006.
Reviews for The Bachelors
A wholly original presence in modern literature
ANDREW MOTION Muriel Spark's novels linger in the mind as brilliant shards, decisive as a smashed glass is decisive
JOHN UPDIKE
New Yorker
I am dazzled by The Bachelors. It is the cleverest and most elegant of all Mrs Spark's clever and elegant books
EVELYN WAUGH She has a receptive and wholly distinctive genius
A N WILSON
Spectator
My admiration for Spark's contribution to world literature knows no bounds. She was peerless, sparkling, inventive and intelligent - the creme de la creme
IAN RANKIN A profoundly serious comic writer whose wit advances, never undermines or diminishes, her ideas
New York Times Book Review
The care with which she uses words is matched by a gloriously carefree attitude. It's all part of her sanity, her breezy authorial self-confidence; and because of this I think that reading a blast of her prose every morning is a far more restorative way to start a day than a shot of espresso
Daily Telegraph
Spark is a natural, a paradigm of that rare sort of artist from whom work of the highest quality flows as elementally as current through a circuit
New Yorker
It's easy to see why Waugh admired The Bachelors. But the comedy here is serious in a way that Waugh's satanically energetic comedies of misery rarely are . . . comedies of English manners have rarely been darker
Daily Telegraph
ANDREW MOTION Muriel Spark's novels linger in the mind as brilliant shards, decisive as a smashed glass is decisive
JOHN UPDIKE
New Yorker
I am dazzled by The Bachelors. It is the cleverest and most elegant of all Mrs Spark's clever and elegant books
EVELYN WAUGH She has a receptive and wholly distinctive genius
A N WILSON
Spectator
My admiration for Spark's contribution to world literature knows no bounds. She was peerless, sparkling, inventive and intelligent - the creme de la creme
IAN RANKIN A profoundly serious comic writer whose wit advances, never undermines or diminishes, her ideas
New York Times Book Review
The care with which she uses words is matched by a gloriously carefree attitude. It's all part of her sanity, her breezy authorial self-confidence; and because of this I think that reading a blast of her prose every morning is a far more restorative way to start a day than a shot of espresso
Daily Telegraph
Spark is a natural, a paradigm of that rare sort of artist from whom work of the highest quality flows as elementally as current through a circuit
New Yorker
It's easy to see why Waugh admired The Bachelors. But the comedy here is serious in a way that Waugh's satanically energetic comedies of misery rarely are . . . comedies of English manners have rarely been darker
Daily Telegraph