Description: Cheerfully poison-tipped, the pen of Dame Muriel Spark is never at a loss. "Dullness", as The New Statesman remarked, "is as foreign to her as inelegance". No writer commands so vivid or so sly a style -- rigorous and entertaining, authoritative and airy. Regarding one of the stories collected here ("The Portobello Road"), Stephen Schiff said in The New Yorker: "Muriel Spark has written some of the best sentences in English. For instance: 'He looked as if he would murder me, and he did.'"A treat for her fan and a fine introduction for new Spark readers, the thirty-seven stories of Open to the Public display the many, many talents of "the most gifted and innovative British novelist of her generation" (David Lodge, The New York Times Book Review).

Dame Muriel Spark, born and educated in Edinburgh, published her spectacularly original first novel, The Comforters, in 1957. Among her 20 novels, it was The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (and its stage and screen adaptations) which made her internationally famous. She has also published several volumes of poetry, criticism, and stories, as well as a play, an autobiography, and a book for children.

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