In 1993, Muriel Spark read from her memoir, “Curriculum Vitae,” and her novel “The Public Image” at the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center. Her editor at The New Yorker, Charles McGrath, ...

She loved lightning. It wasn’t her favorite weapon—fire was, or knives. But lightning has a brutal, beautiful efficiency, and she used it to good effect, once frying alive a pair of lovers. Lightning ...

Obscured by her reputation as a wit is the fact that Spark was a religious writer—indeed, one of the most important religious writers in modern British literature. She embraced Roman Catholicism in ...