{"title":"new arrivals","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"electric-spark","title":"Electric Spark","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“Is the story fact? Is it fiction? It is what it is,” said Muriel Spark.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eMuriel 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.” By following the clues, riddles, and instructions Spark planted for posterity in her biographies, fiction, autobiography, and archives, Frances Wilson aims to crack her code.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eElectric Spark\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e explores not the celebrated Dame Muriel but the apprentice mage discovering her powers. It takes us through her early years, when turmoil reigned: divorce, madness, murder, espionage, poverty, skullduggery, blackmail, love affairs, revenge, and a major religious conversion. If this sounds like a novel by Spark, it is because her experiences in the 1940s and 1950s became, alchemically distilled, the material of her art.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“As good a critic as she is a biographer [and] as sharp a stylist as she is a reader” (\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e), in \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eElectric Spark \u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003eFrances Wilson brings her enormous, incandescent powers to bear on one of the most formidable writers of the twentieth century.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\n\u003cb\u003eFrances Wilson\u003c\/b\u003e is a critic, a journalist, and the author of six works of nonfiction, including \u003ci\u003eHow to Survive the Titanic: or, The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay\u003c\/i\u003e, which won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography; \u003ci\u003eGuilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey\u003c\/i\u003e, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was long-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize; and \u003ci\u003eBurning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence\u003c\/i\u003e, which won the Plutarch Award, was short-listed for the Duff Cooper Prize and the James Tait Black Award, and was long-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Womb House Books ","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67713655898421,"sku":null,"price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0965\/6247\/9413\/files\/electricspark.jpg?v=1792103330"}],"url":"https:\/\/wombhousebooks.com\/collections\/new-arrivals-1.oembed","provider":"Womb House Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}