Asylum

Asylum PDF Author: Patrick McGrath
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307764443
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Patrick McGrath has created his most psychologically penetrating vision to date: a nightmare world rocked to its foundations by a passion of such force and intensity that it shatters the lives--and minds--of all who are touched by it. Stella Raphael, a woman of great beauty and formidable intelligence, is married to Max, a staid and unimaginative forensic psychiatrist. Max has taken a job in a huge top-security mental hospital in rural England, and Stella, far from London society, finds herself restless and bored. Into her lonely existence comes Edgar Stark, a brilliant sculptor confined to the hospital after killing his wife in a psychotic rage. He comes to Stella's garden to rebuild an old Victorian conservatory there, and Stella cannot ignore her overwhelming physical attraction to this desperate man. Their explosive affair pits them against Stella's husband, her child, and the entire institution. When the crisis comes to a head, Stella makes a decision--one that will destroy several lives and precipitate an appalling tragedy that could only be fueled by illicit sexual love. Asylum is a terrifying exploration of the extremes to which erotic obsession can drive us. Patrick McGrath brings his own dazzling blend of cool artistry and visceral engagement to this mesmerizing story of a fatal love and its unspeakably tragic aftermath. And in Stella Raphael, a woman who tears down the walls of her constricted existence to pursue a dangerous passion, he has created a character who will long be remembered for her willingness to take the ultimate risk, even if she must pay the ultimate price.

Asylum

Asylum PDF Author: Patrick McGrath
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307764443
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Patrick McGrath has created his most psychologically penetrating vision to date: a nightmare world rocked to its foundations by a passion of such force and intensity that it shatters the lives--and minds--of all who are touched by it. Stella Raphael, a woman of great beauty and formidable intelligence, is married to Max, a staid and unimaginative forensic psychiatrist. Max has taken a job in a huge top-security mental hospital in rural England, and Stella, far from London society, finds herself restless and bored. Into her lonely existence comes Edgar Stark, a brilliant sculptor confined to the hospital after killing his wife in a psychotic rage. He comes to Stella's garden to rebuild an old Victorian conservatory there, and Stella cannot ignore her overwhelming physical attraction to this desperate man. Their explosive affair pits them against Stella's husband, her child, and the entire institution. When the crisis comes to a head, Stella makes a decision--one that will destroy several lives and precipitate an appalling tragedy that could only be fueled by illicit sexual love. Asylum is a terrifying exploration of the extremes to which erotic obsession can drive us. Patrick McGrath brings his own dazzling blend of cool artistry and visceral engagement to this mesmerizing story of a fatal love and its unspeakably tragic aftermath. And in Stella Raphael, a woman who tears down the walls of her constricted existence to pursue a dangerous passion, he has created a character who will long be remembered for her willingness to take the ultimate risk, even if she must pay the ultimate price.

Spider

Spider PDF Author: Patrick Mcgrath
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501125400
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Spider is gaunt, threadbare, unnerved by everything from his landlady to the smell of gas. He tells us his story in a storm of beautiful language that slowly reveals itself as a fiendishly layered construction of truth and illusion. With echoes of Beckett, Poe, and Paul Bowles, Spider is a tale of horror and madness, storytelling and skepticism, a novel whose dizzying style lays bare the deepest layers of subconscious terror.

The Grotesque

The Grotesque PDF Author: Patrick McGrath
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307822974
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
This exuberantly spooky novel, in which horror, repressed eroticism, and sulfurous social comedy intertwine like the vines in an overgrown English garden, is now a major motion picture, starring Alan Bates, Sting, and Theresa Russell.

Trauma

Trauma PDF Author: Patrick McGrath
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1400075491
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Charlie Weir is a man who tackles other people's demons for a living. He has seen every kind of trauma during his years as a psychiatrist in New York.Yet he hasn't found a way of resolving his own conflicts, particularly the fatal mistake that caused his wife and daughter to leave him condemning him to corrosive loneliness and restless anger.Years later, he meets a beautiful but damaged woman who promises to restore his dwindling faith in both his profession and himself. But as he realizes that she has become more of a patient than a lover, events conspire to send him reeling toward the abyss. Addictive and enthralling, Trauma is Patrick McGrath's most riveting work to date.

Patrick McGrath

Patrick McGrath PDF Author: Sue Zlosnik
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 0708323766
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Patrick McGrath is one of Britain's foremost contemporary novelists but very little has been written about his work to date. This new book offers readings of McGrath's fiction informed by recent scholarship and evaluates his creative contribution to the continuation of the Gothic tradition into the twenty-first century.

The Wardrobe Mistress

The Wardrobe Mistress PDF Author: Patrick McGrath
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1473544807
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
***SHORTLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION*** From the bestselling author of Asylum, Trauma and Spider 'Ghosts of the theatre and the spectre of fascism haunt cold and grimy London in this atmospheric tale from a master of the grotesque.' Guardian JANUARY 1947. London is in ruins, there’s nothing to eat, and it’s the coldest winter in living memory. To make matters worse, Charlie Grice, one of the great stage actors of the day, has suddenly died. His widow Joan, the wardrobe mistress, is beside herself with grief. Then one night she discovers Gricey’s secret. Plunged into a dark new world, Joan realises that though fascism might hide, it never dies. Her war isn’t over after all. 'McGrath is one of the age's most elegantly accomplished divers into the human psyche . . . a master writer.' John Banville ‘McGrath is that rare yet essential thing, a writer who can expose our darkest fears without making us run away from them.' New Statesman 'Wonderfully sinister ... a delight ... you are in for a thrilling ride.' Spectator 'A brilliant evocation of the theatrical world’s seedy glamour, The Wardrobe Mistress is also a moving portrait of a woman struggling to make sense of her past and imagine a future for herself.' Sunday Times '[A] rich and highly spiced feast of a novel, even before it reaches its classically gothic McGrath climax.' Reader's Digest

Patrick McGrath and his Worlds

Patrick McGrath and his Worlds PDF Author: Matt Foley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000763307
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
Following the publication of Ghost Town (2005), a complex, globally conscious genealogy of millennial Manhattan, McGrath’s transnational status as an English author resident in New York, his pointed manipulation of British and American contexts, and his clear apprehension of imperial legacies have all come into sharper focus. By bringing together readings cognizant of this transnational and historical sensitivity with those that build on existing studies of McGrath’s engagements with the gothic and madness, Patrick McGrath and his Worlds sheds new light on an author whose imagined realities reflect the anxieties, pathologies, and power dynamics of our contemporary world order. McGrath’s fiction has been noted as parodic (The Grotesque, 1989), psychologically disturbing (Spider, 1990), and darkly sexual (Asylum, 1996). Throughout, his corpus is characterized by a preoccupation with madness and its institutions and by a nuanced relationship to the gothic. With its international range of contributors, and including a new interview with McGrath himself, this book opens up hitherto underexplored theoretical perspectives on the key concerns of McGrath’s ouevre, moving conversations around McGrath’s work decisively forward. Offering the first sustained exploration of his fiction’s transnational and world-historical dimensions, Patrick McGrath and his Worlds seeks to situate, reflect upon, and interrogate McGrath’s role as a key voice in Anglophone letters in our millennial global moment.

Patrick McGrath

Patrick McGrath PDF Author: Jocelyn Dupont
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443845558
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
This book is the first collected volume to be entirely dedicated to the work of contemporary Anglo-American writer Patrick McGrath. It follows the international conference that was held in his presence at Perpignan University, France, in May 2011. It comprises nine chapters (as well as an introduction and an index) written by scholars specializing in Gothic and American literature, each dealing with specific aspects of McGrath’s work. The volume seeks to encompass the author’s whole literary production to date, spanning a 25-year writing career. It also features an exclusive afterword written by the author himself, who attended all the papers given during the conference with great attention and often intensely enthusiastic reactivity. The editor’s intention is twofold. The idea was first to provide a comprehensive survey of Patrick McGrath’s writing, returning to the aspects that are usually associated with the author’s work, such as his artful narrative control, his inclination for stories of “transgression and decay”, as well as his long-lasting reflexive relationship with the Gothic and the Grotesque. Yet the aim of this volume is also to open new directions for the study of McGrath’s texts, taking into account the noticeable evolution of the writer’s literary production, its growing Americanization and gradual distanciation with modes of excess. It seems that it is no longer possible to tag McGrath’s work as neo- or ‘postmodern’ Gothic. His books’ growing complexity and change of horizons call for fresh investigations. This book will be of interest to students of McGrath’s work, scholars of the Gothic and its contemporary manifestations, as well as to all academics specializing in contemporary American fiction.

Dr. Haggard's Disease

Dr. Haggard's Disease PDF Author: Patrick Mcgrath
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501125419
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
“A stormy tale of obsession…this is a haunting portrayal of a man broken by passion” (Library Journal). Dr. Edward Haggard is a lonely, pain-racked romantic, standing at the window of his house on the edge of a cliff, watching as the clouds of war draw near, and reflecting on the nature of love, death, medicine, war—but most of all on the wife of the senior pathologist, and the few brief months of bliss they shared. Shortly after the outbreak of World War II, a fighter pilot appears in Dr. Haggard’s surgery, reawakening memories of the single grand passion of Haggard’s life. For this young man is the son of the woman Haggard loved, and as the doctor becomes more and more intrigued by the bizarre changes occurring in his new patient’s body, his old passion gives way to a fresh one, a passion altogether odder, and darker, than the first. In true gothic fashion, Patrick McGrath brings to his narration of a doomed love affair and bizarre aftermath an acute erotic intensity, portraying a man whose disease is passion—disease that can exalt a man, but can also destroy him.

Blood and Water and Other Tales

Blood and Water and Other Tales PDF Author: Patrick McGrath
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Severed hands, dead monkeys, swarming insects, pickled body parts and menacing pygmies proliferate in this collection of short stories. They also feature ancient Southern plantations, isolated manor houses, places where ghosts like to lurk and places where spiritual and physical decay presides.