The Complete Short Stories of Saki

Description

The macabre and the hilarious are blended in these unforgettable stories by the one and only Saki. Discover him in this complete edition of all his short stories The buttoned-up world of the British upper classes is exploded by the brilliance, wit and audacity of Saki's bomb-like stories. In 'The Open Window' an imaginative teenager gives a visitor the fright of his life. In 'The Unrest Cure' the ordered home of a respectable country gent is rocked to its core. And 'Laura' expresses the hope of revenge via reincarnation. For punchlines, twists, satire and pure mirth, Saki's stories are second-to-none.

Saki is the pen name of H. H. Munro, born in 1870 in Burma and educated in England. He began his writing career as a journalist and foreign correspondent but later turned to writing fiction - predominantly short stories for which he is best-remembered - as well as one history book. He was 43 when the First World War started. Although he was beyond the age of conscription, and although he was offered an officer's commission, Saki joined the army as an ordinary trooper. He was killed in 1916 in France by a German sniper.

One of the funniest writers in the English language... Saki was incapable of writing a dull sentence, but the final lines of his short stories are works of art in themselves * Daily Telegraph * Read Saki, shiver, then smile. In his mixture of the exotic with the wholly English, of brazen charm with unapologetic spite, he stands alone * Independent * Saki writes like an enemy. Society has bored him to the point of murder. Our laughter is only a note or two short of a scream of fear -- V. S. Pritchett Saki's stories are highly relevant to any society in which convention is confused with morality, and all societies confuse convention with morality, so he'll always be relevant -- Will Self Saki remains, from a distance of a hundred years, just about the sharpest, cruellest, funniest and most elegant short story writer in our language... Saki is like a perfect martini but with absinthe stirred in...heady, delicious and dangerous. Enjoy -- Stephen Fry