Short Fiction

Saki's name is regularly mentioned alongside O. Henry and others as being in the pantheon of short story writers. Like O. Henry, Saki's stories were written in the first several years of the twentieth century, but Saki is known more for his sharp and sometimes scathing wit ("New Wine in Old Bottles") rather than for surprise endings, although he was capable of that as well ("Open Window"). A journalist as well as a writer of fiction, Saki lampooned the high society of his day in his series of "Reginald" and "Clovis" stories. He could also be quite macabre, with many of his stories demonstrating the peril of wild animals ("The Interlopers") and, surprisingly, children ("Gabriel-Ernest"). He managed to mock the retail industry in his story accompanying a Selfridges advertisement ("The Romance of Business"), although it doesn't seem that Selfridges caught the humor.

Although best known by his pseudonym, Saki also regularly used his real name of H. H. Munro in his contributions to the newspapers that first published almost all of his stories.

This Standard Ebooks edition contains every short fiction story that Saki published.

A dazzlingly witty and often macabre collection from one of the great masters of the short story, skewering Edwardian high society with mischievous precision.

The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)