4) this first volume contains all other short stories from Maugham's first mature short story collection, The Trembling of a Leaf (1921), based entirely on notes taken during his travels across the South Seas in the end of the First World War. From his most famous story – "Rain" – until the last one, "The Yellow Streak", which Maugham based on his own experience in the Far East when he nearly drowned himself, there are 30 beautifully written masterpieces in the genre of the short story, quite rightly regarded as classics today.Įxcept for one story ("Red" which you can find in vol. That is precisely what happened with this volume of Collected Short Stories of W. I cannot remember when was the last time when a novel, let alone a short story collection, kept me awake all night long until the dawn broke. ** Essentially, this preface is identical with the one to the first volume of The Complete Short Stories from 1951. Apparently, Maugham's short stories in four volumes and under the title Collected Short Stories were first published in 1963 by Penguin. * This is what you will find if you open any of the four Vintage Classics volumes. įirst published as The Complete Short Stories in 3 vols., 1951.įirst published as Collected Short Stories in 4 vols., 1975.* William Somerset Maugham for introducing me with the multitude of triviality of human lives in such a joking manner. And now, in the end, I'd like to thank Mr. My most loved ones are 'Rain', 'The Fall of Edward Barnard', 'The Pool', 'The Three Fat Women of Antibes', 'Gigolo and Gigolette', 'Judgement Seat' and 'Mr. Thirty is a big number when you're to name your favorite ones from among them specially when all of the thirty stories are equally good, but still there are stories in this collection I will be remembering for a long time. Yet, there are so many variations that Maugham had to write 30 different stories (well,at least for this volume) which certainly is an infinitesimally small number compared to the innumerable possibilities of human behavior patterns. I don't know if Maugham meant it at all but what I surmised from these stories is regardless of the geography, people all over the world are more or less similar. They think alike, they love alike and they lie alike. One thing that might strike you is that people from all over these places in his stories are somewhat close in nature. Expanding from South America to the Down Under Australia, he set his venues for his stories. It's a curious thing that Maugham himself is present in almost all the stories and describes the happenings in the first person.
Maugham was a great traveler and he wrote the stories based upon his experiences in England-his motherland-and other foreign regions. The stories in this book are written in different parts of the world. You definitely will buy his rhetoric style and sometimes he may leave you stupefied. You can almost visualize him telling you stories using his sharp humors with an impassive face. Maugham has got a wonderfully comical tone and he's a very wordy writer. Nor are they different from any regular ones. He dissected and looked into the patterns how humans deal with their fellow brothers and sisters in the everyday life. Evidently, he incorporated this other being of him into his works when he became a writer. Maugham was a doctor in personal life which certainly often led him to play the role of a dissector. Most of these stories mean to scrutinize the human nature. For about three weeks Maugham kept me enchanted with his 30 stories in this book. This is the first of a four volume short story collection by William Somerset Maugham.