The Complete Stories Of Evelyn Waugh

Collected for the first time in a single volume: all of the short fiction by one of the 20th century's wittiest and most trenchant observers of the human comedy.

An audiobook of brilliant entertainments: thirty-nine stories spanning the entire career of a great modern writer and an undisputed comic genius, "a satirist whose skill at sticking pens in people rates him a roomy cell in the murderers' row (Swift, Poe, Wilde, Shaw) of English letters" (Time).

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Evelyn Waugh's short stories are the marvelous, concentrated riffs of his comic genius, revealing in miniaturized perfection all the elements that made him the greatest comic writer of our century. We find in them Waugh's almost superhuman technical skill as a writer and his quicksilver attentiveness to the minutiae of human absurdity, as well as his worldly knowledge, his tenderness, his perceptive compassion, and his sophisticated, disabused, but nevertheless forceful idealism. The thirty-nine stories collected here include such small masterpieces as "Mr. Loveday's Little Outing" and "Scott-King's Modern Europe"; an alternative ending to Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust; a "missing chapter" in the life of Charles Ryder, the hero of Brideshead Revisited; and two linked stories, remnants of an abandoned novel that Waugh considered his best writing. This edition contains the original illustrations to "Love Among the Ruins," as well as more than thirty graphics produced by the author as an Oxford undergraduate in the 1920s.

Vile Bodies is a 1930 novel satirising the bright young things: decadent young London society after World War I. The title appears in a comment made by the novel’s narrator in reference to the characters’ party-driven lifestyle: “All that succession and repetition of massed humanity... Those vile bodies...”

Set on the fictional African island of Azania, the novel chronicles the efforts of Emperor Seth, assisted by the Englishman Basil Seal, to modernize his kingdom. Profound hilarity ensues from the issuance of homemade currency, the staging of a "Birth Control Gala," the rightful ruler's demise at his own rather long and tiring coronation ceremonies, and a good deal more mischief.

In this unique collection of short stories composed between 1910-62, Evelyn Waugh's early juvenilia are brought together with later pieces, some of which became the inspirations for his novels. 'Mr Loveday's Little Outing' is a blackly comic tale of a mental asylum and its favourite resident; 'Cruise' sees a hilarious series of letters from a naïve young woman as she travels with her family; 'A House of Gentlefolks' observes a group of elderly eccentric aristocrats and their young heir; and in 'The Sympathetic Passenger' a radio-loathing retiree picks up exactly the wrong hitchhiker. These witty and immaculately crafted stories display the finest writing of a master of satire and comic twists.