English Short Stories of the 20th century

by Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley

Contents:

Joseph Conrad "The Inn of the Two Witches"
H.G. Wells "The Door in the Wall"
John Galsworthy "The Apple Tree"
G.K. Chesterton "The House of the Peacock", "The Three Horsemen of Apocalypse"
W. Somerset Maugham "Salvatore", "A Casual Affair" , "Lord Mountdrago"
Alfred Edgar Coppard "Dusky Ruth", "The Watercress Girl"
Edward Morgan Forster "The Story of a Panic"
Virginia Woolf "The Legacy"
D.H. Lawrence "The Blind Man"
Katherine Mansfield "Honeymoon", "Taking the Veil"
Agatha Christie "Finessing the King", "The Gentleman Dressed in Newspaper", "The Coming of Mr. Quin", "The Case of the Rich Woman"
Aldous Huxley "Hubert and Minnie"
John Collier "Halfway to Hell", "Incident on a Lake","Great Possibilities"
Graham Greene "I Shy", "Proof Positive"
H.E. Bates "Harvest Moon", "The Beauty of the Dead", Go, Lovely Rose", "Love in a Wych Elm"

416 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British novelist and story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language and, although he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he became a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote novels and stories, many in nautical settings, that depict crises of human individuality in the midst of what he saw as an indifferent, inscrutable, and amoral world.
Conrad is considered a literary impressionist by some and an early modernist by others, though his works also contain elements of 19th-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters, as in Lord Jim, for example, have influenced numerous authors. Many dramatic films have been adapted from and inspired by his works. Numerous writers and critics have commented that his fictional works, written largely in the first two decades of the 20th century, seem to have anticipated later world events.
Writing near the peak of the British Empire, Conrad drew on the national experiences of his native Poland—during nearly all his life, parceled out among three occupying empires—and on his own experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world—including imperialism and colonialism—and that profoundly explore the human psyche.