Selected Stories

Saki

Everyman's Pocket Classics complements highly successful Pocket Poets series, offering the best prose writing in a handy pocket-sized format. Like all Everyman Library books, each title is printed on a cream-wove, acid-free paper with full cloth sewn binding, headbands and silk ribbon marker. Eminently collectable and great gifts.

A hardcover selection of the darkly witty, whimsical and macabre short stories by an acknowledged master of the form.

Saki is the pen name of H. H. Munro, born in 1870 in Burma and educated in England. He began his writing career as a journalist and foreign correspondent but later turned to writing fiction – predominantly short stories for which he is best-remembered – as well as one history book. He was 43 when the First World War started. Although he was beyond the age of conscription, and although he was offered an officer’s commission, Saki joined the army as an ordinary trooper. He was killed in 1916 in France by a German sniper.

Saki's dazzling tales manage the remarkable feat of being anarchic and urbane at the same time. Studded with Wildean epigrams and featuring well-contrived plots and surprise endings, his stories gleefully skewer the pompous hypocrisies of upper-class Edwardian society. But they go beyond mere satire, raising dark humour to extremes of entertaining outrageousness that have rarely since been matched. Saki's elegantly mischievous young heroes sow chaos in their wake without breaking a sweat, occasionally assisted by werewolves, tigers, eavesdropping house pets and casually murderous children. This selection of over fifty stories includes such favourites as 'Tobermory', 'The Open Window', 'Sredni Vashtar', 'Mrs Packletide's Tiger', 'The Schartz-Metterklume Method', and many more.

The Complete Short Stories of Saki

The macabre and the hilarious are blended in these unforgettable stories by the one and only Saki. Discover him in this complete edition of all his short stories

One of the funniest writers in the English language... Saki was incapable of writing a dull sentence, but the final lines of his short stories are works of art in themselves

Read Saki, shiver, then smile. In his mixture of the exotic with the wholly English, of brazen charm with unapologetic spite, he stands alone

Saki writes like an enemy. Society has bored him to the point of murder. Our laughter is only a note or two short of a scream of fear

Saki's stories are highly relevant to any society in which convention is confused with morality, and all societies confuse convention with morality, so he'll always be relevant

Saki remains, from a distance of a hundred years, just about the sharpest, cruellest, funniest and most elegant short story writer in our language... Saki is like a perfect martini but with absinthe stirred in...heady, delicious and dangerous. Enjoy

These stories are cut-glass beauties, pitiless and hard-edged and constantly poking fun at the pretensions of the middle and upper classes... Crisp, funny and perfectly targeted

His stories...bear the hallmarks of Oscar Wilde and Henry James, are as funny as Wilde, Wodehouse and Waugh, possess plotting exquisite enough to bear significant elaboration but rarely last longer than three pages, and are brought off with a wonderfully light touch, while presenting a disturbingly chilling portrait of humankind

My favourite writer of all time is the satirical Edwardian writer HH Munro, who was also known as Saki. He had a very black sense of humour and some of his short stories are so incredibly dark and irreverent that you just can’t help but laugh

His tales are loaded with death and destruction, as well as a heavy dose of flippancy and cynicism. They are peppered with clever, cutting epigrams and usually end with a grim twist. And there are animals - lots of them

Saki is among those few writers, inspirational when read at an early age, who definitely retain their magic when revisited decades later

These delicious, hilarious and yet surgical satires are amongst the finest short stories in the English language

The buttoned-up world of the British upper classes is exploded by the brilliance, wit and audacity of Saki's bomb-like stories. In 'The Open Window' an imaginative teenager gives a visitor the fright of his life. In 'The Unrest Cure' the ordered home of a respectable country gent is rocked to its core. And 'Laura' expresses the hope of revenge via reincarnation. For punchlines, twists, satire and pure mirth, Saki's stories are second-to-none.

Beasts On The Lawn

Beasts on the Lawn is a collection of Edwardian short stories by Saki (H. H. Munro) recycled and restaged in a modern day gated community for the far too wealthy for their own good. The tales are woven together by the character of Clovis, a security guard. She recalls the events of strange days and long nights. The five stories are: Tobermory, The Interlopers, Sredni Vashtar, Gabriel Ernest and Mrs Packletide's Tiger. Starring Pippa Haywood as Clovis, with Nick Mohammed, Alan Coveney, Dolly Wells, Ed Weeks, Jennifer Lee, David Collins, Paul Dodgson, Barbara Flynn, John Sessions, Malcolm Hamilton, Amy Clifton, Carl Prekopp, Ed Weeks, Dolly Wells, Marcia Warren and Jennifer Lee Jellicorse. Adapted by Sean Grundy. Director: Alison Crawford.

Filboid Studge, the Story of a Mouse that Helped

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Hector Hugo Munro, better known by his pen name Saki, was born in Burma in 1870. He came to England for schooling following the early death of his mother, and was raised by his grandmother. After much travelling he followed in his fathers footsteps and worked for the Indian Imperian Police in Burma, before falling ill and returning to England to pursue a career in journalism. He published his first book, The Rise of the Russian Empire, in 1900. Throughout his writing career he worked as a foreign correspondent and fought in World War I, during which he was killed by a sniper in 1916. He was considered a master of the short story.

'Three weeks later the world was advised of the coming of a new breakfast food, heralded under the resounding name of 'Filboid Studge'' 
 
H.H. Munro, better known by his pen name, Saki, wrote wickedly comic satires of upper-class Edwardian life. These seven short stories are macabre and extremely funny: they include a cat that is regrettably taught to speak, a vicious pet ferret worshipped as a god, a businessman triumphantly selling an unpalatable breakfast mush, and many dark twists and barbs. 
 
This book includes Filboid Studge, a Story of a Mouse That Helped, Todermory, Mrs. Packletide's Tiger, Sredni Vashtar, The Music on the Hill, The Recessional and The Cobweb.

The Complete Short Stories

Born H H Munro in Burma in 1870, Saki was educated in England and returned to Burma to join the police force in 1893.  Returning to London in 1896, he worked for the Westminster Gazette and was Balkans correspondent for the Morning Post from 1902. He was killed on the Western Front during World War 1, having volunteered for active service despite being over 40.

Saki is perhaps the most graceful spokesman for England's 'Golden Afternoon' - the slow and peaceful years before the First World War.  Although, like so many of his generation, he died tragically young, in action on the Western Front, his reputation as a writer continued to grow long after his death.  The stories are humorous, satiric, supernatural, and macabre, highly individual, full of eccentric wit and unconventional situations.  With his great gift as a social satirist of his contemporaryupper-class Edwardian world, Saki is one of the few undisputed English masters of the short story.

Saki

Books by Saki

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