Dan Gunn – författare

The first of two volumes of the letters of Muriel Spark, one of the greatest and most fascinating writers of the twentieth century.*One of the TLS Books of the Year 2025* In 1944, on her return to England after a disastrous marriage, Muriel Spark was unknown as a writer except to a handful of close friends; by 1963 she was the internationally renowned author of seven critically acclaimed, bestselling novels.Her letters - witty, affectionate, sharp, mercurial - reveal the turbulence of her early career in postwar London: her struggles to earn a living as a writer, her difficult love affairs, a terrifying breakdown, and her conversion to Catholicism. They also trace her development from little-known poet to celebrated novelist, with glittering insights into the emergence of her unique literary voice, as well as her relationships with friends, lovers, writers and publishers.Selected from her extensive correspondence and insightfully edited and annotated, this is an essential read for anyone interested in Spark's work and world.PRAISE FOR VOLUME 1: '[An] immaculately-edited collection . . . Feisty, fun-filled, witty and, of course, sparky, the letters are a window into a remarkable life that was lived in devotion to literature'ALAN TAYLOR, author of Appointment in Arezzo: A Friendship with Muriel Spark'What an extraordinary life of adventure the young Muriel Spark led. These funny and fraught early letters capture her triumphs and disasters vast and small, not to mention the curious predicaments--personal, artistic, familial--to which she seemed fated. A marvelous book'JOSEPH O'NEILL'Letters is a marvel. Taking in faith, love, fame and feuds, Spark's letters reveal her life to be every bit as compelling as the novels she wrote' JAMES BAILEY, author of Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark'Meticulously edited . . . The letters invited an investigation into both the life and the work' RACHEL CUSK, NEW YORKER'Fascinating . . . edited with exemplary attention to detail by Dan Gunn. There are delightful touches throughout' SPECTATOR'The book I wanted not to end was The Letters of Muriel Spark (Virago), superbly edited by Dan Gunn, spanning 1944 to 1963. She was fun, she was charming, and if you weren't careful - sometimes even if you were - she was vengeful'JAMES CAMPBELL, TLS Books of the Year 2025'Wonderful . . . An eye-opening reflection of her daily life and an important contribution to her literature' SCOTTISH SUNDAY POST'A must-read' STANDARD'Gunn faced a formidable task in distilling into two volumes a body of about 3,500 letters and capturing the nature and force of Spark's personality. . . he has risen to the challenge impressively' CLAIRE HARMAN, LITEARY REVIEW'Spark's selected letters [exhibit] the glorious range of Muriel's intellect, anxieties, love and rage, her sense of frailty as well as of strength. For these are often spectacularly good, funny, painful statements, which Gunn has edited brilliantly' MARTIN STANNARD, THE OLDIEAs Gunn's meticulously edited first volume of Muriel Spark's letters shows, so much happened to her it is no surprise she found material for a lifetime's fiction . . . A spellbinding portrait of the writer as a relatively young woman' ROSEMARY GORING, HERALD

This second volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett opens with the war years, when it was often impossible or too dangerous to correspond. The surge of letters beginning in 1945, and their variety, are matched by the outpouring and the range of Beckett's published work. Primarily written in French and later translated by the author, the work includes stories, a series of novels (Molloy, Malone meurt and L'Innommable), essays and plays - most notably En attendant Godot. The letters chronicle a passionately committed but little known writer evolving into a figure of international reputation, and his response to such fame. The volume provides detailed introductions which discuss Beckett's situation during the war and his crucial move into the French language, as well as translations of the letters, explanatory notes, year-by-year chronologies, profiles of correspondents and other contextual information.

This third volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett focuses on the years when Beckett is striving to find a balance between the demands put upon him by his growing international fame, and his need for the peace and silence from which new writing might emerge. This is the period in which Beckett launches into work for radio, film and, later, into television. It also marks his return to writing fiction, with his first major piece for a decade, Comment c'est (How It Is). Where hitherto he has been reticent about the writing process, now he devotes letter after letter to describing and explaining his work in progress. For the first time Beckett has a woman as his major correspondent: a relationship shown in his intense and abundant letters to Barbara Bray. The volume also provides critical introductions, chronologies, explanatory notes and profiles of Beckett's main correspondents.

This fourth and final volume, which completes the Cambridge edition of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, covers the final twenty-four years of what was, as Beckett saw it, a surprisingly long life. During these years he produced many of his finest and most concentrated works for theatre, plays that included Not I, Ohio Impromptu, and Catastrophe; for television he wrote Eh Joe and Ghost Trio; while in prose, he produced the late 'trilogy' that comprises Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho. In 1969, Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the letters from this period show him struggling to cope with the pressures created by his ever-growing international fame. The letters reveal how, later, he turned his mind to his legacy, as seen through his interactions with biographers and archivists. This volume also provides chronologies, explanatory notes, translations, and profiles of Beckett's chief correspondents.

The Emperor of Ice-Cream tells the moving tale of an Italian family living in Scotland during the rise of Mussolini and his rule in Italy. The story is told from the point of view of Lucia, the family's daughter, who, at 83, reflects on her childhood. Her tale leads inexorably through the rise of Fascism to the terrible moment in June 1940 when Mussolini declared war on Britain, resulting in the internment of British Italians. Two of Lucia's brothers, Giulio and Emilio, judged to be "enemy aliens," are forced aboard the Arandora Star, the ship that is to lead them into exile. However, the ship is sunk by a U-boat, and only one of the brothers survives. Lucia is writing now, belatedly, to try to reconcile herself to her past, and as a tribute to her beloved lost brother. The Emperor of Ice-Cream is a novel about family, about being an immigrant and dealing with bigotry, about religious sectarianism, political idealism, and disillusionment, about sibling love and sibling rivalry, and about regret, poetry, and war. And of course, it is also about ice cream.