The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh

A “lavishly entertaining” (Publishers Weekly) short fiction collection from the man Time hailed “one of the century’s great masters of English prose.”

“Wonderful to behold. . . . Waugh is here in all his glory.” —Susan Minot, Bookforum

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. 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.

“A necessary purchase, and you should be able to claim it against tax as an aid to professional sanity. . . . You emerge braced and bolstered, as if by a cold shower and a cocktail. . . . That Waugh enriched us with the unalloyed gleam of his prose—far purer than any of his leaden imitators manage—is now beyond debate.” —Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

“The man was incapable of writing a bad sentence.” —J. Bottum, Washington Times