Read Collected Short Fiction Online
Authors: V. S. Naipaul
Tags: #Literary, #Fiction, #General, #Short Stories (Single Author), #Trinidad and Tobago, #Trinadad and Tobago, #Short Stories
Peonies, China! So many empires had come here. Not far from where we were was the colossus on whose shin the Emperor Hadrian had caused to be carved verses in praise of himself, to commemorate his visit. On the other bank, not far from the Winter Palace, was a stone with a rougher Roman inscription marking the southern limit of the Empire, defining an area of retreat. Now another, more remote empire was announcing itself. A medal, a postcard; and all that was asked in return was anger and a sense of injustice.
Perhaps that had been the only pure time, at the beginning, when the ancient artist, knowing no other land, had learned to look at his own and had seen it as complete. But it was hard, travelling
back to Cairo, looking with my stranger’s eye at the fields and the people who worked in them, the dusty towns, the agitated peasant crowds at railway stations, it was hard to believe that there had been such innocence. Perhaps that vision of the land, in which the Nile was only water, a blue-green chevron, had always been a fabrication, a cause for yearning, something for the tomb.
The air-conditioning in the coach didn’t work well; but that might have been because the two Negro attendants, still with the habits of the village, preferred to sit before the open doors to chat. Sand and dust blew in all day; it was hot until the sun set and everything went black against the red sky. In the dimly lit waiting-room of Cairo station there were more sprawled soldiers from Sinai, peasants in bulky woollen uniforms going back on leave to their villages. Seventeen months later these men, or men like them, were to know total defeat in the desert; and news photographs taken from helicopters flying down low were to show them lost, trying to walk back home, casting long shadows on the sand.
August 1969–October 1970
CHINUA ACHEBE
The African Trilogy
Things Fall Apart
ISABEL ALLENDE
The House of the Spirits
ISAAC ASIMOV
Foundation
Foundation and Empire
Second Foundation
(in 1 vol.)
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid’s Tale
GIORGIO BASSANI
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Second Sex
SAMUEL BECKETT
Molloy, Malone Dies,
The Unnamable
(US only)
SAUL BELLOW
The Adventures of Augie March
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Ficciones
RAY BRADBURY
The Stories of Ray Bradbury
MIKHAIL BULGAKOV
The Master and Margarita
JAMES M. CAIN
The Postman Always Rings Twice
Double Indemnity
Mildred Pierce
Selected Stories
(1 vol. US only)
ITALO CALVINO
If on a winter’s night a traveler
ALBERT CAMUS
The Outsider (UK)
The Stranger (US)
The Plague, The Fall,
Exile and the Kingdom,
and Selected Essays
(in i vol.)
WILLA CATHER
Death Comes for the Archbishop
(US only)
My Antonia
RAYMOND CHANDLER
The novels (2 vols)
Collected Stories
G. K. CHESTERTON
The Everyman Chesterton
KATE CHOPIN
The Awakening
JOSEPH CONRAD
Heart of Darkness
Lord Jim
Nostromo
The Secret Agent
Typhoon and Other Stories
Under Western Eyes
Victory
ROALD DAHL
Collected Stories
JOAN DIDION
We Tell Ourselves Stories in
Order to Live (US only)
UMBERTO ECO
The Name of the Rose
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Sound and the Fury
(UK only)
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
The Great Gatsby
This Side of Paradise
(UK only)
PENELOPE FITZGERALD
The Bookshop
The Gate of Angels
The Blue Flower
(in i vol.)
Offshore
Human Voices
The Beginning of Spring
(in 1 vol.)
FORD MADOX FORD
The Good Soldier
Parade’s End
RICHARD FORD
The Bascombe Novels
E. M. FORSTER
Howards End
A Passage to India
ANNE FRANK
The Diary of a Young Girl
(US only)
GEORGE MACDONALD FRASER
Flashman
Flash for Freedom!
Flashman in the Great Game
KAHLIL GIBRAN
The Collected Works
GÜNTER GRASS
The Tin Drum
GRAHAM GREENE
Brighton Rock
The Human Factor
DASHIELL HAMMETT
The Maltese Falcon
The Thin Man
Red Harvest
(in 1 vol.)
The Dain Curse
The Glass Key
and Selected Stories
(in 1 vol.)
JAROSLAV HAŠ EK
The Good Soldier Švejk
JOSEPH HELLER
Catch-22
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
A Farewell to Arms
The Collected Stories
(UK only)
MICHAEL HERR
Dispatches (US only)
PATRICIA HIGHSMITH
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Ripley Under Ground
Ripley’s Game
(in 1 vol.)
JAMES JOYCE
Dubliners
A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man
Ulysses
FRANZ KAFKA
Collected Stories
The Castle
The Trial
MAXINE HONG KINGSTON
The Woman Warrior and
China Men
(US only)
RUDYARD KIPLING
Collected Stories
Kim
GIUSEPPE TOMASI DI
LAMPEDUSA
The Leopard
D. H. LAWRENCE
Collected Stories
The Rainbow
Sons and Lovers
Women in Love
DORIS LESSING
Stories
PRIMO LEVI
If This is a Man and The Truce
(UK only)
The Periodic Table
NAGUIB MAHFOUZ
The Cairo Trilogy
Three Novels of Ancient Egypt
THOMAS MANN
Buddenbrooks
Collected Stories (UK only)
Death in Venice and Other Stories
(US only)
Doctor Faustus
Joseph and His Brothers
The Magic Mountain
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
The Garden Party and Other
Stories
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
The General in His Labyrinth
Love in the Time of Cholera
One Hundred Years of Solitude
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
Collected Stories
CORMAC McCARTHY
The Border Trilogy
YUKIO MISHIMA
The Temple of the
Golden Pavilion
TONI MORRISON
Beloved
Song of Solomon
ALICE MUNRO
Carried Away: A Selection
of Stories
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Lolita
Pale Fire
Pnin
Speak, Memory
V. S. NAIPAUL
Collected Short Fiction (US only)
A House for Mr Biswas
R. K. NARAYAN
Swami and Friends
The Bachelor of Arts
The Dark Room
The English Teacher
(in 1 vol.)
Mr Sampath — The Printer of
Malgudi
The Financial Expert
Waiting for the Mahatma
(in 1 vol.)
IRENE NEMIROVSKY
David Golder
The Ball
Snow in Autumn
The Couril of Affair
(in 1 vol.)
FLANN O’BRIEN
The Complete Novels
FRANK O’CONNOR
The Best of Frank O’Connor
GEORGE ORWELL
Animal Farm
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Essays
Burmese Days, Keep the Aspidistra
Flying, Coming Up for Air
(in 1 vol.)
ORHAN PAMUK
My Name is Red
BORIS PASTERNAK
Doctor Zhivago
SYLVIA PLATH
The Bell Jar (US only)
MARCEL PROUST
In Search of Lost Time
(4 vols, UK only)
JOSEPH ROTH
The Radetsky March
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Midnight’s Children
PAUL SCOTT
The Raj Quartet (2 vols)
ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN
One Day in the Life of
Ivan Denisovich
MURIEL SPARK
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The Girls of Slender Means
The Driver’s Seat
The Only Problem
(in 1 vol.)
CHRISTINA STEAD
The Man Who Loved Children
JOHN STEINBECK
The Grapes of Wrath
ITALO SVEVO
Zeno’s Conscience
JUNICHIRO TANIZAKI
The Makioka Sisters
JOHN UPDIKE
The Complete Henry Bech
Rabbit Angstrom
EVELYN WAUGH
The Complete Short Stories
Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved
One, The Ordeal of Gilbert
Pinfold (in 1 vol.)
Brideshead Revisited
Decline and Fall (US)
Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies,
Put Out More Flags (UK)
A Handful of Dust
The Sword of Honour Trilogy
Waugh Abroad: Collected Travel
Writing
H. G. WELLS
The Time Machine,
The Invisible Man,
The War of the Worlds
(in 1 vol. US only)
EDITH WHARTON
The Age of Innocence
The Custom of the Country
Ethan Frome, Summer,
Bunner Sisters
(in 1 vol.)
The House of Mirth
The Reef
OSCAR WILDE
Plays, Prose Writings and Poems
P. G. WODEHOUSE
The Best of Wodehouse
VIRGINIA WOOLF
To the Lighthouse
Mrs Dalloway
RICHARD YATES
Revolutionary Road
The Easter Parade
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
(in 1 vol.)
W. B. YEATS
The Poems (UK only)