Product Description<br/><br/><br/>Evelyn Waugh's short fiction reveals in miniaturized perfection the elements that made him the greatest satirist of the twentieth century. The stories collected here range from delightfully barbed portraits of the British upper classes to an alternative ending to Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust; from a missing chapter in the life of Charles Ryder, the nostalgic hero of Brideshead Revisited, to a plot-packed morality tale that Waugh composed at a very tender age; from an epistolary lark in the voice of a young lady of leisure to a darkly comic tale of scandal in a remote (and imaginary) African outpost.<br/>The Complete Stories is a dazzling distillation of Waugh's genius, abundant evidence that one of the twentieth century's most admired and enjoyed English novelists was also a master of the short form.<br/><br/><br/>Review<br/><br/><br/>A concise, readable piece of Waugh scholarship that deserves a place in all library collections; highly recommended.-- "Library Journal"<br/><br/><br/>A necessary purchase...You emerge braced and bolstered, as if by a cold shower and a cocktail...That Waugh enriched us with the unalloyed gleam of his of his prose-far purer than any of his leaden imitators manage-is now beyond debate.-- "New Yorker"<br/><br/><br/>All the readers who became addicted to Waugh through his novels will find plenty to delight them in...Complete Stories.-- "Washington Times"<br/><br/><br/>Although not really known as a short-story writer, this first-time gathering of his work in that form is incontrovertible evidence of his short-story writing ability. These thirty-nine stories span Waugh's writing career, and to a one they demonstrate his trademark wit and sophistication.-- "Booklist"<br/><br/><br/>An acute, affectionate interpretive biography.-- "New York Times"<br/><br/><br/>At his best, Waugh is a blazing practitioner of the short story, for it proves an ideal framework for a style that eschews the psychoanalytical investigations of modernist writers like Joyce or Woolf for taut social commentary, stylized characters and hilarious, dramatic conceits. Few aspects of life in England between the wars escape Waugh's blistering attention...His misanthropy notwithstanding, Waugh is so adept at punchy openings, deadpan zingers, and wickedly ironic situations, and so graceful is his use of language, that this volume should serve, at a time of renewed interest in the short story, as primer on the infinite possibilities of the form.-- "Publishers Weekly"<br/><br/><br/>Mordant, mirthful, and unrelenting in their lampoon of aristocratic mischief, Evelyn Waugh's novels have earned him a permanent place in the literary pantheon. But this cantankerous master...was no less adept when it came to the short form....And he continued to write short fiction throughout the rest of his career, all of which has now been collected in the delectable Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh. The first few entries in the collection capture a kinder, gentler author, not yet red at the verbal tooth and claw. But by 1932, when he wrote 'Love in the Slump, ' Waugh's eye for the black-comic detail was firmly in place...Waugh's wit only sharpened throughout the succeeding decades, and the very texture of his prose thickened...The Complete Stories offers an accurate and stupendously entertaining vision of human folly, no less effective for being administered in smaller doses.-- "Amazon.com, editorial review"<br/><br/><br/>Terrifically good, witty and wild.-- "Boston Globe"<br/><br/><br/>About the Author<br/><br/><br/>Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), whom Time called one of the century's great masters of English prose, wrote several widely acclaimed novels as well as volumes of biography, memoir, travel writing, and journalism. Three of his novels, A Handful of Dust, Scoop, and Brideshead Revisited, were selected by the Modern Library as among the 100 best novels of the twentieth century.<br/><br/><br/>Simon Prebble, a British-born performer, is a stage and television actor and veteran narrator of some three hundred audiobooks. As one of AudioFile's Golden Voices, he has received thirty-s