Synopses & Reviews
These thirty stories most set in the colonies at a time when the Empire was still assured, in a world in which men and women were caught between their own essentially European values and the richness and ambiguity of their unfamiliar surroundings show a master of the genre at the peak of his power.
Review
"His achievement was large...The short story was Maugham's true métier, and some of the stories he wrote are among the best in the language." Anthony Burgess, the Listener
Review
"[Somerset Maugham] has given infinite pleasure and left us a splendour of writing which will remain for as long as the written English word is permitted to exist." Dirk Bogade, the Daily Telegraph
Review
"If all else perish, there will remain a storyteller's world...that is exclusively and forever Maugham, a world of verandah and prahu which we enter as well as we do that of Conan Doyle's Baker Street, and with a happy and eternal homecoming." Cyril Connolly, The Sunday Times
Synopsis
This final classic collection reveals Somerset Maugham s unique talent for exposing and exploring the bitter realities of human relationships in tales of love, infidelity, passion and prejudice. The stories range from The Lotus Eater where a man envisions a life of bliss in the Mediterranean, to the astringent tales of The Outstation and The Back of Beyond in Malaya and South East Asia.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-datetranslations by award-winning translators."
About the Author
W. Somerset Maugham was born in 1874 and lived in Paris until he was ten. He was educated at King's School, Canterbury, and at Heidelberg University. He afterwards walked the wards of St. Thomas's Hospital with a view to practice in medicine, but the success of his first novel,
Liza of Lambeth (1897), won him over to letters. Something of his hospital experience is reflected, however, in the first of his masterpieces,
Of Human Bondage (1915), and with
The Moon and Sixpence (1919) his reputation as a novelist was assured.
His position as one of the most successful playwrights on the London stage was being consolidated simultaneously. His first play, A Man of Honour (1903), was followed by a procession of successes just before and after the First World War. (At one point only Bernard Shaw had more plays running at the same time in London.) His theatre career ended with Sheppey (1933).
His fame as a short-story writer began with The Trembling of a Leaf, sub-titled Little Stories of the South Sea Islands, in 1921, after which he published more than ten collections.
W. Somerset Maugham's general books are fewer in number. They include travel books, such as On a Chinese Screen (1922) and Don Fernando (1935), essays, criticism, and the self-revealing The Summing Up (1938) and A Writer's Notebook (1949).
W. Somerset Maugham became a Companion of Honour in 1954. He died in 1965.
Table of Contents
- The book bag
- French Joe
- German Harry
- The four Dutchmen
- The back of beyond
- P. & O.
- Episode
- The kite
- A woman of fifty
- Mayhew
- The lotus eater
- Salvatore
- The wash-tub
- A man with a conscience
- An official position
- Winter cruise
- Mabel
- Masterson
- Princess September
- A marriage of convenience
- Mirage
- The letter
- The outstation
- The portrait of a gentleman
- Raw material
- Straight flush
- The end of the flight
- A casual affair
- Red
- Neil Macadam