The accomplished traveller describes the history, people, and life of Europe, South America, and the U.S., all seasoned by his impressions.

The author recounts his early life, his encounters with such figures as Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, and the development of his own literary career

Nine works are presented by the English master of the short story

Six stories deal with a game of hide-and-seek, a bored hairdresser, a superstitious salesman, the visit of an eccentric sister, and an agressive photographer

Product Description: V.S. Pritchett explores the connections between Chekhov’s life and art, showing how Chekhov (1860-1904) often based his fiction on experiences of his difficult early years where he was responsible for his impoverished family, and as a young doctor, reported on the conditions of the Russian penal colony at Sakhalin...read more

Offers an insightful account of the nineteenth-century Russian writer's evolution as a master of drama and the short story

These twenty-nine stories, selected from five collections and dating from 1930 to 1979, demonstrate the full range and development of Pritchett's style and concerns

The essayist, critic, novelist, short story writer, and biographer presents 203 essays on such writers as Gibbon, Cervantes, Balzac, Flaubert, Woolf, Shaw, Twain, Garcia Lorca, Updike, Rushdie, and others.

Gathers eighty-two stories that capture the unexpected moments, contradictions, and minor tragedies of modern life

Three British explorers search the Brazilian jungle for a missionary who disappeared there seventeen years earlier

Five stories describe a bored wife's infatuation with a servant, monastic life, an international bet, a sentry who leaves his post to save a drowning man, and ghosts.

The distinguished English critic relates the events, quality, and complexities of the Russian master's life to the incidents, concerns, and complexities of his stories and novels

In Mr. Pritchett's view, rules, regulations and blitzes have brought things to such a pass that the moment will come when only the reader ‘and the hundred best authors are left in the world and have somehow to shake down together.' To prepare for this ‘unnerving situation' he has re-read and re-assessed some of these authors, and the essays collected in this book are the fruit of his cogitations. Gibbon, Mrs. Gaskell, Dostoevsky, Fielding, Kilvert, Twain, Synge, Swift, Browning, are some of the writers Mr. Pritchett discusses. Names and dates are diverse, but nearly all have one common characteristic: they demonstrate the axiom that past and present are often parallel in most unexpected ways. Swift anticipated modern science and its consequences nearly two hundred years ago. Thackeray drew a modern Mayfair playboy when he created Rawdon Crawley. Huckleberry Finn is blood relation to Charlie Chaplin. These essays should appeal to scholars and the unlearned alike. Those who have neglected their classics will make discoveries which they can follow up with the aid of the appendix. The well-read cannot fail to be stimulated by the learning, vitality and originality which make up the texture of Mr. Pritchett's mind. Victor Sawdon Pritchett (1900-1997) was born over a toyshop in 1900 and, much to his everlasting distaste, was named after Queen Victoria. A writer and critic, his is widely reputed to be one of the best short story writers of all time, with the rare ability to capture the extraordinary strangeness of everyday life. He died in 1997.

Essays discuss a variety of authors, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Salman Rushdie

Highlights the London of past and present with excerpts from literary works and traditional songs