The critical essays of V.S. Pritchett are unparalleled for their wit, geniality, subtlety and profound good sense. His survey of writers ranges from Fielding and Smollett to Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Nathanael West and William Golding... from Balzac to Dostoevsky and Gorky, with wonderful detours for minor figures. Pritchett's commentaries are short and incisive and are written from the point of view of the engaged reader rather than from the specialized...

V.S. Pritchett, our foremost contemporary literary critic, himself a master of the short story, considers Turgenev's writing in depth, offering new insights into such works as A Month in the Country, First Love, Torrents of Spring, A Nest of Gentlefolk, Smoke, and of course, Turgenev's masterpiece, Fathers and Sons. The Gentle Barbarian is the work of one literary master about another; Pritchett's interpretation of his subject is at once subtle and...

The Myth Makers is the first volume of essays in fifteen years by V.S. Prichett, a literary critic. The Myth Makers gives us profound "re-views" of such literary masters as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekov, Flaubert, Stendhal, Zola, George Sand, Machado de Assis, Strindberg, Kafka, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Borges, and Garcia Marquez, among others. Each essay featured illuminates the interplay between the life and work of a writer.

A wealthy woman whose husband is a pilot owes a lot of money to every shopkeeper in town.

Johnson, a young native in the British civil service, is a clerk to Rudbeck, Assistant District Officer in Nigeria, and imagines himself to be a very important cog of the King's government. He is amusingly tolerant of his fellow Africans, thinking them uncivilized; he is obsessed with the idea of bringing "civilization" to this small jungle station. Johnson loves the white man's ways and cheerily adopts them; he has an enthusiasm that makes his boss...

Gathers stories from the U.S., England, and Ireland by such noted writers as Hawthorne, Poe, James, Conrad, Joyce, O'Flaherty, Lessing, and Updike.