Former editor on Spark bio
Charles McGrath, who edited Muriel Spark at The New Yorker, offers a mixed review of Martin Stannard’s Spark biography.
Charles McGrath, who edited Muriel Spark at The New Yorker, offers a mixed review of Martin Stannard’s Spark biography.
Narrative reprints my 2008 essay, “Conversations You Have at Twenty,” at The Huffington Post.
Mark Twain, who died a hundred years ago today, entered the world and left with Halley’s Comet. His essays have a permanent place on my bedside table; I read them whenever my own writing stalls. Those perfect verbs, those unexpected but accurate nouns, that distinctive sense of the absurd and limitless ability to evoke it… We’ve had our difficulties, Twain . . .
My appreciation of Deborah Eisenberg’s Collected Stories — which explore “people’s most complex and secret feelings, ‘mental states … that are just on the border of expressible’” — is up at NPR. An excerpt: In an early story, “What it Was Like, Seeing Chris,” a teenager who’s “pale and long” like her little sister but believes she lacks the younger . . .