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.
Not Getting on with Aunts
Second-hand copies of The Penguin Complete Saki can be bought on Amazon for a very reasonable £5.60. The book contains 135 short stories, 3 novels and 3 plays. There’s also a foreword by Noël...
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