Duel Duet: Selected Stories

by Graham Greene, Yiyun Li (editor)

Graham Greene, known for his iconic novels, also wrote extraordinary short stories. Here some of the best have been arranged into pairs - to be read as a duel or duet - by novelist and Greene aficionado, Yiyun Li.

Twenty-two of Greene’s very best stories are collected here, each of them bearing the hallmark themes that characterise his great innocence and vengeance, love and hate, pity and violence.

Writer and Greene aficionado, Yiyun Li, has arranged the stories into pairs, to be read together in contrast or in harmony – as a duel or a duet. In doing so Li draws out the extraordinary power in Greene’s work, creating an ingenious new perspective on a writer we thought we knew. Unexpected, surprising and wide-ranging, this is the short fiction of one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most adored storytellers, revealing his brilliance as never before.

‘No twentieth-century writer had a subtler mind for human comparison’ Zadie Smith

‘Greene had wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the ranks of world literature’ John le Carré

'One of the most important British writers of the twentieth century' Daily Telegraph

‘A superb storyteller’ New York Times

‘One of the finest writers of any language’ Washington Post

‘One of our greatest authors’ Independent

SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY YIYUN LI

371 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 7, 2025

About the author

Henry Graham Greene was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of the 20th century.
Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers (or "entertainments" as he termed them). He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. Through 67 years of writing, which included over 25 novels, he explored the conflicting moral and political issues of the modern world. The Power and the Glory won the 1941 Hawthornden Prize and The Heart of the Matter won the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Best of the James Tait Black. Greene was awarded the 1968 Shakespeare Prize and the 1981 Jerusalem Prize. Several of his stories have been filmed, some more than once, and he collaborated with filmmaker Carol Reed on The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949).
He converted to Catholicism in 1926 after meeting his future wife, Vivienne Dayrell-Browning. Later in life he took to calling himself a "Catholic agnostic". He died in 1991, aged 86, of leukemia, and was buried in Corseaux cemetery in Switzerland. William Golding called Greene "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety".