Patrick McGrath | |
|---|---|
 McGrath in 2015 | |
| Born | 7 February 1950 London, England |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Education | Birmingham College of Commerce |
| Genre | Gothic fiction |
| Spouse | |
Patrick McGrath (born 7 February 1950) is a British novelist, whose work has been categorised as gothic fiction.
McGrath was born in London and grew up near Broadmoor Hospital from the age of five [1] where his father was Medical Superintendent. [2] He was educated at a Jesuit boarding school in Windsor from the age of thirteen, before moving to another Jesuit public school, Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, upon the closure [1] of his first school. In 1967, [3] at the age of sixteen, he ran away from this institution to London. [1] He graduated from the Birmingham College of Commerce with an honours degree in English and American literature in 1971, [3] awarded externally by the University of London, before his father found him a job later that year in Penetang, Ontario working in the Oakridge top-security unit of the Penetang Mental Health Centre. [3]
He has lived in various parts of North America and also spent several years on a remote island in the North Pacific, before finally settling in New York City in 1981. [4]
McGrath also worked as a teacher of creative writing to undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin in the fall semester of 2006. [3] He also taught craft courses for a number of years in the MFA program at Hunter College, New York, and since 2007, has taught an MFA program at the New School in New York. [3]
His archive was acquired by the University of Stirling, Scotland. [5]
His fiction is principally characterised by the first person unreliable narrator, and recurring subject matter in his work includes mental illness, repressed homosexuality and adulterous relationships. [6]
His novel Martha Peake won the Premio Flaiano Prize in Italy [7] and Asylum was shortlisted for the 1996 Guardian Fiction Prize. [4]
He is also currently on the writing faculties of both the New School in New York and Princeton University. [3]
Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing at Princeton, Joyce Carol Oates, makes the case that McGrath is transcribing the "nightmares of the 'shattered personality' that resonate within us all," calling his short stories "masterful and seductive, ... Bold, original, and disquieting tales are told by narrators who are themselves bizarre (a boot, a fly—to name just two) and are in most cases omniscient." [8]
On 27 June 2018, the University of Stirling, Scotland, conferred on him the degree of Doctor of the University "for Patrick McGrath's outstanding support of academic research." [9]
He is married to actress Maria Aitken and divides his time between London and New York City. [10] He is the oldest of four siblings. [1]
Three of McGrath's novels and one of his stories have been adapted into films, two of which adaptations (Spider, 2002 and The Grotesque, 1995) were written by McGrath himself. [3] The film adaptation for Asylum, 2005 was written by Patrick Marber and a short film made of The Lost Explorer from Blood and Water and Other Tales was adapted by Tim Walker. [3] From The Wardrobe Mistress [11] to the current unnamed novel-in-progress on the Spanish Civil War, [12] McGrath shows increased interest in the fascistic tendencies in international politics and its effects on the psychology of characters. In the former, for example, the main character Joan Grice uncovers the man she had been living with for a long time, who recently died, had been in the past a member of Mosley's British Union of Fascists. This revelation is so upsetting that causes her to get crazy, and her mental breakdown is signed by a murderous act. Similarly, in McGrath's Last Days in Cleaver Square (2021), the narrator, an old man called Francis McNulty—a Spanish civil war veteran—is haunted by Francisco Franco's ghost, which appears in his London garden, and later in his bed, too. He is so much obsessed with his hallucinations that at a certain point, while in Madrid, Franco's spirit causes him to commit a bizarre act of atonement.
McGrath has also co-edited and written the introduction to a highly influential anthology of short fiction, The New Gothic. [3]
He has published many reviews and essays, including introductions to Barnaby Rudge , Moby Dick , The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde , and In a Glass Darkly. [3]
Gothic fiction, sometimes called Gothic horror, is a loose literary aesthetic of fear and haunting. The name refers to Gothic architecture of the European Middle Ages, which was characteristic of the settings of early Gothic novels.
Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel Them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1839 in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, then included in the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840. The short story, a work of Gothic fiction, includes themes of madness, family, isolation, and metaphysical identities.
Spider is a 2002 psychological thriller film produced and directed by David Cronenberg and based on the 1990 novel of the same name by Patrick McGrath, who also wrote the screenplay.
Donald Barthelme Jr. was an American short story writer and novelist known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction, and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine. It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature for its illustration of the attitudes towards mental and physical health of women in the 19th century. It is also lauded as an excellent work of horror fiction.
Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer is an epistolary novel by Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, published in 1992. It won the Whitbread Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize the same year.
Alan Bissett is an author and playwright from Hallglen, an area of Falkirk in Scotland. After the publication of his first two novels, Boyracers and The Incredible Adam Spark, he became known for his different take on Scots dialect writing, evolving a style specific to Falkirk, suffused with popular culture references and socialist politics. He also applied to be rector of the University of Glasgow in 2014.
Spider is a novel by the British novelist Patrick McGrath, originally published in the United States in 1990. In the novel, a psychological thriller with an unreliable narrator, the protagonist wrestles with mental illness and trauma from his past.
The Grotesque is a 1989 gothic fiction novel by British author Patrick McGrath. It was adapted into a 1995 film starring Alan Bates, Lena Headey, Theresa Russell and Sting.
"The Lonesome Place" is a short story by American writer August Derleth. The story is part of a compilation of short stories in the book Lonesome Places. Published in 1962, by Arkham House Publishing, "The Lonesome Place" tells the story of two young boys terrorized by a mysterious creature who they believe lives in an abandoned grain elevator in their small town.
"The Romance of Certain Old Clothes" is a short story by American-British author Henry James, written in February 1868 and first published in The Atlantic Monthly. The original debut was in Volume 21, Issue 124. James later made some revisions, including changes to the family name and eldest daughter when he published the story in the UK in 1885. It has been included in several anthologies, including American Gothic Tales, edited by Joyce Carol Oates.
"In the Penny Arcade" is a short story by American writer Steven Millhauser. It is one of seven short stories previously published in the early 1980s in venues such as the New Yorker, Grand Street, Antaeus, and the Hudson Review. Like Millhauser's two novels, they are about the ability of artists and children to see things anew, to remake things through the force of their own romantic yearnings, and the dangerous consequences of that gift.
Asylum is a 1996 gothic fiction novel by British author Patrick McGrath. The novel is the chronicle of a story about self-obsession narrated by the point of view of a psychiatrist. It was adapted into a 2005 film directed by David Mackenzie.
Exotic Gothic is an anthology series of original short fiction and novel excerpts in the gothic, horror and fantasy genres. A recipient of the World Fantasy Award and Shirley Jackson Awards, it is conceptualized and edited by Danel Olson, a professor of English at Lone Star College in Texas.
Sierra McGrath-Ripoche is a fictional character from Patrick McGrath's novels. She was introduced in 1990 in the Psychological fiction novel Spider as Sierra and became an omnipresent character in the works of the author. Patrick McGrath admitted in 1992 that this running story was created to make live his daughter-like character.
Centipede Press is an American independent book and periodical publisher focusing on horror, weird tales, crime narratives, science fiction, gothic novels, fantasy art, and studies of literature, music and film. Its earliest imprints were Cocytus Press and Millipede Press.
Martha Peake: a Novel of the Revolution is a 2000 novel by the British author Patrick McGrath. It tells the story of the grotesquely crippled Harry Peake and his daughter Martha, their involvement with the mysterious anatomist Lord Drogo, the tragic events that separate them, and the subsequent flight of Martha to America at the dawning of the Revolution.
Night-Side: Eighteen Tales is a collection of 18 works of short fiction by Joyce Carol Oates published by Vanguard Press in 1977.
Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque is a collection of 16 works of short fiction by Joyce Carol Oates published in 1994 by E. P. Dutton. The volume includes an afterword by Oates.
