Something that is noticeable by the fact that the narrator only has eighty francs which is to last him the month. He may have published a book but his funds are not adequate enough for him to dine in restaurants. Taken from his Collected Short Stories collection the story is narrated in the first person by an unnamed narrator and after reading the story the reader realises that Maugham may be exploring the theme of struggle. Somerset Maugham we have the theme of struggle, innocence, greed, responsibility, selfishness and appearance. Much too many favourites had to be left out.In The Luncheon by W. Altogether 43 short stories here, and even Top 15 would be a hard one to compile.
SOMERSET MAUGHAM SHORT STORIES FULL
Lastly, there is one very disparate group that includes four full collections - Ashenden (1928, 6 stories) Six Stories in First Person Singular (1931), The Mixture as Before (1940) and Creatures of Circumstance (1947, save Flotsam and Jetsam) - and seven pieces from Maugham's travel that were reprinted in any of his collections but did find place in The Complete Short Stories (1951). So there's another Top 10, a very cosmopolitan one:įrom Maugham's early stories, nicely collected in Seventeen Lost Stories I can, for once, try a Top 5, for these certainly rather immature in comparison with his later masterpiece. Yet there are such a huge fun that I find Top 5 to be impossible. Much shorter and less complex, the 29 ''very short stories'' in this volume have nothing in common with Maugham's other collection. Of course there are several exotic stories among the Cosmopolitans but these really should be discussed separately. So here is my Top 10 of Maugham's exotic tales: Even though these are only 19 stories, I find it impossible to make Top 5 - I might just as well take the complete Trembling of a Leaf save Honolulu.
There is one later exotic tale, Flotsam and Jetsam, which appeared much later in Creatures of Circumstance (1947). The exotic tales are three full collections, six stories each - The Trembling of a Leaf (1921), The Casuarina Tree (1926) and Ah King (1933) - the first set in the South Seas and the rest in the Far East which is a little closer, at least from European point of view. Here are my (mostly) Top 10s in four different categories: exotic tales, Cosmopolitans, preWWI stories, all others (spy stories + mostly European settings). I am not quite sure that makes any sense, but it's fun. It occurred to me that it might be useful to split Maugham's short stories to several groups - they are so vastly different from one another - and make several Top 10 selections. For me this is short story is Virtue if it's too long for the editors: Louise or Mr Know-All.
To have some fun with the other extremity, I have a proposition for one and only one story which should be included in a putative anthology as best representative of Maugham's style and outlook. (Sometimes the difference exceeds a decade, as in the case of Louise for instance: it was first published in book form in 1936.) The Taipan is the only one which was never published in a short story collection, apart from The Collected Short Stories of course, but first appeared in Maugham's first mature travel book, On a Chinese Screen (1922). Hell of a choice indeed! The years in brackets for the most part indicate the first appearance in magazine so don't be puzzled that they don't match the years in which the collections themselves appeared. In more or less chronological order, my top ten looks thus: Since I am a great fan of Maugham's short story collections as they were originally published - each one has its own character and charm - I would go through them, picking one, or at most two pieces, to compile this top ten. Still, let me try one putative top ten, though with the firm statement that this is very, very limited number. (Four out of five from Cosmopolitans, significantly.)įrom Maugham's first five mature collections, six stories each, published between 19, and collected in East and West (1934, Altogether in England) I wouldn't want to be without even my least favourite one (which is Miss King from Ashenden, by the way). Indeed, it's much easier to compile top five of Maugham's worst short stories from the mature ones:
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