A collection of short fiction by the only first-rate comic genius that has appeared in England since Bernard Shaw (according to Edmund Wilson), Charles Ryder's Schooldays returns to print eleven short stories by Evelyn Waugh, together with a recently discovered sketch about the early life and family background of Charles Ryder, the nostalgic hero of Brideshead Revisited. Likely intended as the first chapter of a novel tracing the emotional roots of the enigmatic Brideshead narrator, the title story is a sensitive, convincing portrait of a young man emerging from schoolboy conformity to a tentative criticism of the subhuman, wholly respectable world around him. The other stories - brilliant entertainments in the manner of Waugh's early comic novels - include By Special Request (written as an alternative ending to A Handful of Dust ) and Incident in Azania, a return to the scene of Black Mischief. A worthy and welcome addition to Waugh's published works, these stories display all the outrageous wit and satiric intelligence for which Time awarded him a roomy cell in the murderer's row (Swift, Pope, Wilde, and Shaw) of English letters.