Collected Short Stories: Volume 1

by W. Somerset Maugham

This first volume of Somerset Maugham's collected short stories includes the famous story 'Rain', the tragedy of the prudish missionary Mr Davidson and Sadie Thompson, the prostitute. The collection contains thirty stories that take us from the islands of the Pacific Ocean to England, France and Spain. They all reveal Maugham's acute and often sardonic observation of human foibles and his particular genius for exposing the bitter reality of human relationships.

Somerset Maugham learnt his craft from Maupassant, and these stories display the remarkable talent that made him an unsurpassed storyteller.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Classics, Literature, British Literature, 20th Century, English Literature

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1951

About the author

William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874. He spoke French even before he spoke a word of English, a fact to which some critics attribute the purity of his style.

His parents died early and, after an unhappy boyhood, which he recorded poignantly in Of Human Bondage, Maugham became a qualified physician. But writing was his true vocation. For ten years before his first success, he almost literally starved while pouring out novels and plays.

Maugham wrote at a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized as 'such a tissue of clichés' that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way.

During World War I, Maugham worked for the British Secret Service . He travelled all over the world, and made many visits to America. After World War II, Maugham made his home in south of France and continued to move between England and Nice till his death in 1965.

At the time of Maugham's birth, French law was such that all foreign boys born in France became liable for conscription. Thus, Maugham was born within the Embassy, legally recognized as UK territory.

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading short stories is like having sneaky little snacks before dinner!

And these are properly prepared, delicious, exotic, high quality snacks that go well with a morning coffee or an afternoon drink (I suggest cava or prosecco, even though the characters in the stories insist on cocktails and whiskey).

I might actually have eaten so many of these snacks I can just skip the heavy dinner novel and go straight to dessert, which, obviously, will be served in the form of the second part of Maugham's collected stories. But like a short story within the short stories, they are unfortunately currently lost in transportation like home delivery dinners in corona times.

So then I might as well have lunch with another book and go for dessert tasting later on.

Reading pleasure postponed is reading pleasure still to be enjoyed.

That's all I have to say about Maugham's stories, as it is already rather meaningless to talk about the details of novels in reviews. So it is even meaninglesser (sorry, that was too tempting!) to summarise the excitement of one little gem after the other.

Read and see.

I promise it's worth the effort. Cheers!

[Tea Jovanović · Rating 5 out of 5]

Niko ne ume da napiše tako dobru kratku priču kao Somerset Mom... Mnogi savremeni pisci su od njega "učili" da pišu... Toliko ljudi ga voli a tako je malo prevođen na srpski... nažalost...

[Smiley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recall my tough reading from each story due to my limited vocabulary, intermediate grammar and dialogs in various contexts some 50 years ago while in/after my college years. However, I kept reading on and on and had humble pride in reading him with relative enjoyment and due appreciation; therefore, I've long owned my grateful thanks to Maugham's readable style, I think my English has thus been improved gradually from such seemingly intensive reading exploration.

I think it is one of the ways of the fleeting world when his popularity has normally decreased due to passing years into the 21st century, modernity, new young blood, etc. However, these should not be the reasons why we don't read him at all; first, nowadays we can conveniently visit to know him more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Some..., second, go to some good public/university libraries or large bookstores for his works to find something short and enjoyably readable to read, that is, you may start with any short story in this volume; and finally, try reading one of his any short novels before plunging into his famous "Of Human Bondage" (Vintage 2000).

As for Maugham's newcomers, I would like to encourage them to try according to their reading capability. Indeed, it took years for me to read only 18 from 30 stories but some years ago for some reason I decided to have a go and hopefully plan to finish these remaining 12 as follows: Rain, The fall of Edward Barnard, Honolulu, The luncheon, Mackintosh, The voice of the turtle, The judgement seat, Me Know-All, The poet, The mother, The promise, and The yellow streak.

Thanks to Jenny who posted her Like today (2017.12.23) on my one-paragraph review of this book, it's one of the rare encouragements for it because then I had no idea to write more there. So I get it from the shelf and write something on what I did and had ideas from this one. It will be unthinkably out of the idea of reviewing all stories in there; in contrast, I would read his famous first story "Rain" to recapture what I found, understood, reflected, etc. from it; being scribbled next to the title 'Stunning end'.

I have just finished reading his first 48-page story in this volume and still found it stunningly horrible; it's about "the tragedy of a narrow-minded missionary and a prostitute" (back cover). It is a tragedy due to the complexity of human's mind, those who can solve and explain this case for us to understand, I think, should have their expertise in psychology/psychiatry. The married missionary was Mr Davidson, the prostitute Miss Sadie Thompson. He is narrow-minded due to his ways of dealing with Miss Thompson by insisting that she would be returned to San Francisco via the ship from Sydney but she disagrees, she hates going back to the penitentiary. So the missionary has intensely prayed for absolution of her sin, she agrees to do as advised but mysterious situations ensue leading to his stunning death on the beach. One of the reasons is that, I think, this story proves the powers of nature in that the rain is more or less one of the causes that affects human's psyche. While reading the story, I wondered why the title "Rain" would relate to or have effect on the plot and the characters till I read the following two clarifying extracts:

1) the nature of falling rain at Apia, one of the best descriptions I have ever read on such persistent tropical rain:
And Dr Macphail watched the rain. It was beginning to get on his nerves. It was not like our soft English rain that drops gently on the earth; it was unmerciful and somehow terrible; you felt in it the malignancy of the primitive powers of nature. It did not pour, it flowed. It was like a deluge from heaven, and it rattled on the roof of corrugated iron with a steady persistence that was maddening. It seemed to have a fury of its own. And sometimes you felt that you must scream if it did not stop, and then suddenly you felt powerless, as though your bones had suddenly become soft; and you were miserable and hopeless. (p. 26)

And 2) its decisive effect on some people:
'I have no doubt the loneliness is getting on her nerves,' said the doctor. 'And the rain - that's enough to make anyone jumpy,' he continued irritably. 'Doesn't it ever stop in this confounded place?' (p. 29)

If you are still a bit reluctant to read him, this is a message from its back over, again, to you: 'The short story was Maugham's true metier, and the stories he wrote are among the best in the language'. - Anthony Burgess

[Muhammad · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first of a four volume short story collection by William Somerset Maugham. For about three weeks Maugham kept me enchanted with his 30 stories in this book. 30 canons I'd say. Most of these stories mean to scrutinize the human nature. Maugham was a doctor in personal life which certainly often led him to play the role of a dissector. Evidently, he incorporated this other being of him into his works when he became a writer. He dissected and looked into the patterns how humans deal with their fellow brothers and sisters in the everyday life. The stories are not extraordinary. Nor are they different from any regular ones. Yet they ARE unique. Maugham has got a wonderfully comical tone and he's a very wordy writer. You can almost visualize him telling you stories using his sharp humors with an impassive face. You definitely will buy his rhetoric style and sometimes he may leave you stupefied.

The stories in this book are written in different parts of the world. Maugham was a great traveler and he wrote the stories based upon his experiences in England-his motherland-and other foreign regions. It's a curious thing that Maugham himself is present in almost all the stories and describes the happenings in the first person. Expanding from South America to the Down Under Australia, he set his venues for his stories. One thing that might strike you is that people from all over these places in his stories are somewhat close in nature. They think alike, they love alike and they lie alike. 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. 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.

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. 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. Know All'. And now, in the end, I'd like to thank Mr. William Somerset Maugham for introducing me with the multitude of triviality of human lives in such a joking manner. Great job Sire.

[Sandhya · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some writers who once you sample their works, you cannot resist until you have covered a fair share of it. With Somerset Maugham, the challenge is both thrilling as well daunting. Thrilling because here an author I am so happy I discovered and someone with whom I almost feel a kindred spirit - in terms of the themes he takes up and his so called cynicism - which is really not cynicism, but a certain astounding ability to discern human weaknesses. He's realistic about people, knowing well that human beings are inconsistent and complex. Also, he realized that seemingly incongruous traits can exist in the same person. This prevented Maugham from either eulogizing a person too much or berating the evilness in him. According to Maugham, he could never judge anyone too harshly or be too shocked by sin, precisely because he was guilt-ridden about many things himself and understood only too well that perfection is a myth and that we all live extremely flawed lives. He said, “I take the goodness of the good for granted, and I am amused when I discover their defects or their vices. I am touched when I see the goodness of the wicked, and I am willing enough to shrug a tolerant shoulder at their wickedness.”

...The rest can be read at http://sandyi.blogspot.com/2010/01/co...

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before anything else let me forward any future readers of this edition that pages 316 and 317 have been printed out of order so that the opening of the story 'Mr Know All' interrupts the conclusion of 'The Judgement Seat'. Most readers would probably figure it out but my noticing it helps prove that I do really read the books I review!

Considering how long ago Maugham died and how much longer it has been since most of these stories were written it is amazing not only how readable but relevant and true the stories are. Maugham was a prolific writer and was a vastly popular playwright and novelist. Today his plays are forgotten along most of his novels but the stories shine out. It doesn't matter that the entire social and political world he knew and wrote from within has vanished because he always, in his stories, makes plain that he can see clearly the utter foolishness and transience of that world and it's sacred cows and pretensions. His analysis of human behaviour is spot on - the trappings and conventions change but the human snobbery, pretentiousness, greed and hypocrisy remain constant.

It is one of the great pities that Maugham like so many other queer writers of that time, E M Foster is another example, remained closeted long after he had piled up enough worldly riches and renown that to have protected him from the consequences of being more open. Unfortunately he had become trapped in the social acceptance and toleration by the same society he so brilliantly eviscerated in his writing. The colying destructive grip of English respectability prevented him, like Forster, from possibly writing something really, personally true and significant. He feared revelation even though in his heart he knew that everyone knew and the longed for baubles like the Order of Merit would never be granted him (the hilarious and deleterious affects of the absurd UK honour system is a subject awaiting for an author of genius).

What ultimately is important is the writing, his stories in particular. I can't tell you how much pleasure they have given me over the years when read in individual collections or gathered together as here. If you have not read any of Maugham's stories then do yourself a favour and find one of their numerous editions and discover a true master of English story telling.

[Steve Payne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve never had a problem answering that old chestnut of a question, who is your favourite writer? For me it’s Somerset Maugham every time – with second place being a fair distance behind. I can half-heartedly and tiredly pick up one of his books at the end of a long day and within a couple of minutes – BANG! – he’s got me. I can think of no other writer who can do this so consistently. He can create an alluringly exotic, or more familiar world which simmers with anticipation in just a couple of sentences, and in two more populate it with a cast of clearly drawn characters facing conflict or intrigue. The perfect attributes for the short story.

Many of Maugham’s novels would be in my top 100 books (including The Painted Veil, Of Human Bondage and The Razor’s Edge), but most enjoyable of all are three of the four volumes of collected short stories (I wouldn’t include the third volume, which is a narrow collection primarily made up of spy stories). This review is for Volume One.

Personally, I’d say about a dozen of the thirty stories here are top notch Maugham, ten are merely good, leaving just eight falling below par.

My absolute favourites would be ‘Rain’ – the much filmed story of a disparate group of travellers quarantined in a rainy and oppressive Samoa (including the bawdy Sadie Thompson); ‘The Pool’ – a white British man falls for and marries a native Samoan in the 1920s, to the horror of the white community; and 'The Facts Of Life' – a naïve young man nearly comes a cropper in the Riviera to a manipulative woman (typical Maugham character), fortunately, as the young man’s father has explained to him, “My belief is that your boy’s born lucky, and in the long run that’s better than to be born clever or rich.”

So many rich and characterful stories – 'Mr Know-All' (oh to be trapped aboard ship with the most annoying man imaginable), 'The Yellow Streak' (a man wracked with guilt at not saving the life of another), 'The Fall Of Edward Barnard' (a man works abroad for a year before marrying his lady – but finds himself falling in love with paradise), 'The Lion’s Skin' (a deliciously waspy tale of one man accusing another of being a pretender), 'Mackintosh' (a fellow white man in Samoa is horrified at the way another white man treats the natives), 'The Voice Of The Turtle' (a writer who is writing a story about a soprano is introduced to one), 'Louise' (a ‘sickly’ woman affects the lives of others), 'The Promise' (a tale of a woman who likes the attention of various men) and 'The Unconquered' (a de Maupassant-type story set in wartime, in which opposing sides meet - a German soldier and a French woman).

Given his great output, Maugham will leave you with much to analyse and ponder over – but without pretension; for at the heart of it all, he is quite simply a master story teller.

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

This huge collection of short stories from W Somerset Maugham cover his earlier writing from 1920 onwards. The stories appealed to me as I have always loved Ian Fleming's Maugham style short story Quantum of Solace, & I thought it was time I read the real thing.
Many of the stories here are enjoyable & take the reader away to places & times far from their own esperiences.
Some of the stories (like Rain, The Escape & The Yellow Streak) were excellent & pulled me deeply into them. Unfortunately, although I enjoyed many of the tales I never found myself fully engaged with the characters. Apologies to my Goodreads friend Steve, who is a huge fan of this author. Thankfully he, & many others like him, can see the impressive writing talent that Maugham has & I'm just sorry to say that I cannot.

[Ana · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great storyteller Somerset Maugham is. Ranging from as little as 4 pages to a few dozens, each story is a delight to read: there is tension, often there is fun, many times tragedy and the prose is beautiful. What else can a reader ask for?

[Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most memorable stories in this collection are those that deal with Western/British colonists in the Far East and Pacific Islands. The stories revolving around this subject are often wry and ironic, beautiful descriptions of the exoticism of the foreign climes and the mental isolation that such geography provokes in Maugham's character. The best of these stories exploit the broiling tensions, the understated violence and the sweat and grime of non-English landscape; they are stories of the time they were written, and while some of the descriptions would not fly today, particularly some of dubious gener politics, I do not think the collection is offensive or offputting from a politically sensitive stance.

Once the collection moves from the far flung countries back into Europe the level of quality diminishes, and while none of the tales are ever outright poor, the stories set in Spain and France do not have the collective punch of the colonial exercises. However, there are still great reads to be had, one story concerning a German soldier in World War 2 and his relationship with a French family, is quite powerful and its dark ending succeeds in shocking.

All in all, a superb collection of stories that have been written with great precision.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

W. Somerset Maugham's The Collected Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham: Volume 1 is the first of four volumes of the author's short stories put out by Penguin Books. It turned out to be an almost ideal book to read while traveling outside the United States, as more than half of the stories were set outside of Britain.

I found it interesting that Maugham introduced himself as a very urbane, cosmopolitan character who acted as a witness to tales told by other characters. That first person character is actually a fiction, as Maugham in real life was not as he described himself. (But then, is anyone ever?) If the author saw himself as a fictional character, it didn't ultimately matter to me.

What did matter is that his stories are almost uniformly excellent. I am somewhat surprised that he is not considered one of the giants of English literature.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good, diverse collection of stories, some tragic, some light and amusing. Most are excellent, a few are too long and the story did not interest me, which is why I gave four stars, not five.

The stand out stories are -

The Fall of Edward Barnard
The Luncheon
The Ant and the Grasshopper
Appearance and Reality
The Facts of Life
The Voice of the Turtle
The Unconquered
The Poet

The stories I didn't find interesting -

The Pool
Before the Party
The Yellow Streak

[Joseph Grinton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read these stories one after another without getting distracted by anything else. I was astonished by how good they were. I love the way he describes people. He always chooses exactly the right words. He is like a skilful portrait painter. You know these people are real and he has captured them perfectly. But he also has a mischievous sense of humour. He is at once wicked and compassionate. Absolutely exquisite.

[Христо Блажев · Rating 3 out of 5]

За британците в заника на империята: https://knigolandia.info/book-review/...

Тук са строителите на империята, благородници, които винаги са на положение – и за които слабостта е опасна, особено когато е показана в естествената им среда: парламента, където дебнат хищните очи на политическите съперници. Също и пищните салони, на които се събират най-отбрани люде с различни таланти и професии, а тяхното комбиниране е издигнато почти в наука. Религията си пробива път в разкази като “Клисарят”, но само да за бъде осмяна от прагматичния дух на времето. Но повечето разкази се развиват отвъд границите на Острова, сред безбрежните предели на империята. И Моъм далеч не се спира само на мъжете с шлемовете, а и на жените, тези практични британки, които също могат да пуснат корени навсякъде.

Издателство ФАМА
https://knigolandia.info/book-review/...

[Xiaolink · Rating 5 out of 5]

真喜欢这个译本，太喜欢陈以侃的翻译风格了，接地气，不做作，无翻译腔。前半部更精彩，后面略平淡。毛姆八卦起来真是谁也比不了，大套路就是我的一个朋友说。。。

[Czarny Pies · Rating 4 out of 5]

Volume 1 of Somerset Maugham’s “Collected Stories” will be an absolute delight for any reader who happens to be interested in the history of the British Empire as it contains a large number of tales set in the Malay Archipelago during the first three decades of the 20th century. Maugham describes brilliantly the relations between the whites, the Chinese, the Malays, the Melanesians and half-casters albeit from the white or European perspective.
Maugham’s protagonists find themselves at the end of the world at the end of their ropes. With few exceptions their tales finish badly. They have found themselves in the East either by chance or because they were second raters unable to succeed in Britain. Once in the region, they have trouble playing by the rules of the colonial society. The most frequent error is entering into relations with the natives. Neither side accepts the half-caste children that result and the protagonist’s flounder. The merchants and planters go bankrupt. The colonial administrators get trapped in low level posts and the missionaries win few new souls for Christianity. Maugham shows us an imperial enterprise that is badly conceived and badly mismanaged. The reader understands why the Japanese were able to so quickly and so effortlessly seize control of the entire region during WWII.
A second major group of stories dealing with the American and English expatriate communities of the French Riviera. These tales are as light and cheerful as the Malayan tales are grim. Gay divorcees and other scoundrels prosper in southern France where they are able to evade the rules of English or American society while not having to mix with the French. Although these stories are quite amusing, they are essentially trivial.
The third group of stories are set in Spain. With out exception they are all dreadful. They show the Spaniards to be vain, obsessed with honour and violent. At times they remind the reader of the Spain of Garcia Lorca or Luis Bunuel. However, they are grotesque and seem quite inauthentic. Fortunately, there are relatively view Spanish stories and they do not greatly undermine the overall collection.
Maugham’s great talent as short story writer is his ability to very quickly describe his characters and to give them depth. His protagonists and his secondary characters are as fully developed as those in novels. Plots are his great weakness. His endings are predictable and frequently trite. He often resorts to suicide to conclude his pieces.
The value of this anthology comes from the tales set in the Malayan archipelago which offer remarkable sociological and historical insight into a colonial system that was swept away during WWII. Readers with a strong interest in history are most likely to enjoy this collection.

[Rhea Gajaria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wish I heard about Maugham earlier in my life. Though a bit dense to read (attributing that to the old english writing style) the stories were beautiful written and some of the best shorts I’ve ever read.

[Mariano Hortal · Rating 5 out of 5]

No haré reseña de este libro que me dejaron pero no quiero dejar pasar la oportunidad de recomendarlo.
William Somerset Maughan sorprendió en una época en la que el modernismo estaba irrumpiendo con nuevas narrativas y formas de entender y realizar literatura. Él se mantuvo constante en su forma de realizar, sobre todo, sus cuentos, en los cuales es un maestro, heredero de Chejov, creador de historias que suele ambientar en paisajes exóticos; recordemos de hecho "el velo pintado" o el archiconocido "RAIN".
Disfrutado en su lengua original, me ha parecido sencillo de seguir. Una prosa elegante, sencilla en la construcción de frases, un superclase que deja siempre una pequeña sorpresa en unos cuentos que van en crescendo hasta el momentazo final.
Dos grandes muestras de su buen hacer son los fabulosos "Rain" y "The three fat women of Antibes", prodigios que son paradigmáticos de su forma de crear y evolucionar las historias.
Para aquellos que pretendan leer algo en inglés es la mejor forma de empaparse en prosa británica de calidad.

[Manuel Alfonseca · Rating 3 out of 5]

ENGLISH: Third time I have read this collection of 30 stories. It contains his famous story "Rain," which I do not like. The story I liked most was "Mackintosh," whose two main characters stand clearly for two very famous real people. I leave the reader the homework of discovering who. Of the remainder, I liked 14 above the others. One of them, "The unconquered," is a harsh story about France under the nazis. Curiously enough, I didn't like much his stories about Spain.

ESPAÑOL: Esta es la tercera vez que he leído esta colección de 30 historias, que contiene la famosa "Lluvia", que no me gusta. La que más me ha gustado ha sido "Mackintosh", cuyos dos personajes principales representan claramente a dos personas reales muy famosas, aunque dejo que el lector descubra quiénes son. De las demás, hay 14 que me gustan más que las otras. Una de ellas, "La inconquistada", es un relato muy duro sobre la Francia ocupada por los nazis. En cambio no me gustaron mucho sus relatos sobre España.

[GD · Rating 5 out of 5]

This writer has always been one of my favorites, somehow he has a really distinctive voice but at the same time writes in a way that makes the reader forget he's reading words and there is only the story left to enjoy. You can tell he's known a lot of people and probably heard all these stories in some form or another and then wrote them down. He personally chose the stories himself and put themin the order he wanted them in, which goes georgaphically from the South Pacific to England, Paris, Spain, the SE Asia, generally. I guess he was trying to give an around-the-world feel, which is kind of dorky, if that is in fact what he was doing. But anyway, one of the most readable writers ever.

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why is this guy not more well known? Why hasn't this collection of stories been turned into a Netflix or HBO series? They have everything. I've never been so entertained by a single collection of stories.
Looking forward to the next volume.

[R Davies · Rating 3 out of 5]

I always enjoy WSM's writing, but the structure of this set of short stories didn't help, beginning with colonial tales often set in the pacific islands features inevtiably a lot of language that is wince inducing. However much I rationally acknowledge it is of it's time, the frequent use of half-caste, negro, native, nigger made it a much less enjoyable experience. Thankfully once we're away from his travels, back in England or France, it's much easier to settle into these shorts and enjoy his writing again.

[cool breeze · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maugham is a skilled writer, but I think he may not be aging well a century later. Volume 1 of 4 of these collected short stories puts you in his time and many places (England, Riviera, Malaysia, Samoa), but most of the stories are depressing. I might try Volume 3, the Ashenden spy stories, but I will probably skip Volumes 2 and 4, which sound like more of the same as those I just read in Volume 1.

[Shawn Thrasher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of these short stories are difficult to read in their overtly racist characters and tone (I don't know enough about Maugham to know if he shared the views of some of his characters or not). Others were delightfully dry and droll. Many were like epigrams: short - pithy - with a witty punch or twist of surprise at the end. I enjoyed those the best.

[Maitê · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure if this was arranged around a theme (tropical islands and rich white people living in different countries) but I really liked the selection and specially the mixture between what was clearly fiction based on his knowledge of people and far places in the world and things that sound like might actually have happened to him.

[Hannah Cook]

Calling it quits after 7 of the 30 stories. Very much a product of its time by which I mean racist and sexist. They’re not from exactly the same era but it is depressing and unsurprising that Maugham is so incredibly famous but the far superior Barbara Pym is basically unheard of.

[Tim Julian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I remember coming across a few of these stories over the years, in various anthologies, ("Rain", "The Ant and the Grasshopper") but this is the first time I've read a whole volume, and very entertaining they are too.
Certain themes reoccur time and again, one being the author's transparent approval of what we might call "living life to the full" (the Grasshopper philosophy) over that of the careful, accumulating Ants, and the superiority of "primitive" cultures over Western civilisation. I would imagine that the digs at religious hypocrisy were considered a bit daring a hundred years ago, too.
The best stories are those where the protagonists are British or American - he's on shakier ground in the Spanish stories, (The Mother, The Point of Honour) for example.
Many of the stories have a kind of "framing" device ("this was a story told to me by....") and the overall effect is that of listening to an urbane and slightly cynical raconteur entertaining the company over brandy and cigars. Excellent.

[Chris Waterford · Rating 4 out of 5]

These were consistently better than his Far Eastern Tales---most of them were very entertaining.

[Chandar · Rating 5 out of 5]

In these days of the novel (no, not Corona) written to be made into a movie, the art of short story writing pales into insignificance. This bunch of stories written mostly about a hundred years ago is a masterly exercise in exploring human relationships with all their variety in emotions, character traits and foibles. Kind of nostalgic reading experience!

[Anshul Gaurav · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was a time, not so long ago, when choosing a book for that compulsory assignment wasn't a pretty difficult task. Lazy bums, like yours truly, had their work cut out. Go to the bookworm's room in the floor above,dig his shelf for the thinnest book available (simple English preferred). Try to read it else google.

 One such search of size zero books led me to a rather popular set of books. This time there was some effort involved : making choices. The animal farm was quickly put back, students review it from 8th standard(if not earlier) not to showcase the satire but simply size and language. Then came Cather in the rye, one level above but still too common for a literature course for a 21 year old.  The third and the last one was a rather obscure one titled, Cakes and Ale by William Somerset Maugham. What caught me were three things : first, the size and second, which I learned from Wikipedia. The dude was really popular. The third and the most important reason was, the stupid guy had no more less than a 100 pager. And they call themselves book lovers. Bah!

 Such was the introduction of perhaps my favourite author yet. Having read most of his works, I can say the man was a master. (Warning : If you think I am biased, well sorry to disappoint. A commoner.)
 
 Browsing through the endless shelves of the bookstore, I grabbed a copy of a collection of his short stories. Now, it is very difficult a task to review a single novel. Twenty stories embedded in one book, imagine. 

 A set of stories under the heading 'The Pacific' aptly describe a few stories. Not only do they represent the fact of there being set in remote isles of the giant but also like the great ocean, the soul of man is inconstant and uncertain.
 In 'Mackintosh', a sensible and sincere man of work bears a hatred, for his superior, of magnitude even he is unaware.
 In 'Rain', a catholic missionary falls from grace as the devil wins him over.
 'The fall of Edward Bernard', is a tale of a passionate and ambitious man in pursuit of happiness. 

Another set titled 'The Casurania Tree' is a collection of tales of people of the Malay Peninsula and Borneo. 
 'Before the party' is a striking revelation by a respectable and well settled woman who murders her own husband in cold blood. 
 In 'P & O', a man embarks on a journey back home. He is cursed by a native to not complete it. A mockery of a place's culture by the civilised , and orderly westerners to their own peril sums the story up.
 
There are many more some of the more noticeable ones being
' Mr. Harrington's Washing' : a tale of an American businessman who gets himself in danger for life over unwashed linen in a country run over by civil war and strife.
'The Kite' : a man leaves his love over a issue as petty as a broken kite.
'Salvatore' : a most striking story about a person who is a nobody and there is nothing spectacular about him to even mention but one quality which we describe the least, an inherent goodness of being.

 In all his works Somerset Maugham expounds on the vagaries of human nature, sometimes beyond comprehension of common sense. The most striking thing about his works is the fact that he like most of us, looks for answers to comprehend the most complex of all things : human behaviour. He makes 'Monsters' from men and 'Men' from monsters. But he never judges. In fact, this can be real disconcerting at times because of one characteristic of human behaviour : We don't really know the right thing to do, unless told so. 

Overall, I highly recommend all of his works. Period