The Complete Short Stories by W. Somerset Maugham
Requirements: ePUB Reader, vol.I East and West 1.43MB, vol.II The World Over 1.23MB
Overview: The stories in the first volume are arranged in strictly chronological order of writing which must have taken some pains since it doesn’t always correspond to the final volumes…Interestingly, the order appears to have been arranged by Maugham himself, for he thought the reader might want to follow his progress…
The second volume makes no such use of order and rightly so for it is much more diverse…But the reader should remember that many of these stories were written on a magazine commission and therefore are naturally much shorter, simpler and designed exclusively for light entertainment.
Save the short stories which you can find in many a modern paperback, by far the most important part of this two volume Doubleday edition are of course the prefaces, and they are not so easy to find. Both of them were later reprinted in Selected Prefaces and Introductions of W. Somerset Maugham (1963), but with minor deletions done by Maugham himself. The preface to the second volume is rather short and not altogether important, but the preface to the first is not only quite long, but a real gem, too. Both pieces contain a good deal deal of repetition of course; in the second one, for instance, you’ll find large chunks from the original preface to Cosmopolitans copied almost verbatim…
Together with the introduction to his anthology of short stories Teller of Tales (Doubleday, Doran, 1939) and his late essay The Short Story (from Points of View, 1958) , the preface to East and West ranks as one of the most substantial pieces Maugham ever wrote entirely dedicated to a literary form he excelled at. It is worth having a closer look at it.
Some half of the preface is dedicated to the two most revered short story writers by Maugham: Chekov and Maupassant. Their styles and personalities are subjected to as close a scrutiny as the limited space allows…
Genre: General Fiction/Classics
Download Instructions:
Volume 1 East and West http://gestyy.com/wLd7yU
Volume 2 The World Over http://gestyy.com/wLd7yP
Mirror:
Volume 1 East and West http://gestyy.com/wLd7yD
Volume 2 The World Over http://gestyy.com/wLd7yH
