Collected Short Fiction of V. S. Naipaul - (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics) by V S Naipaul (Hardcover)

About the Book

Offers insight into the author's range and creative process, in a treasury that includes pieces from such classics as "Miguel Street" and "In a Free State."

Book Synopsis

For the first time: the Nobel Prize-winning author's stunning short fiction collected in one volume, with an introduction by the author. - "Naipaul is the world's writer, a master of language and perception." --The New York Times Book Review

Over the course of his distinguished career, V. S. Naipaul has written a remarkable array of short fiction that moves from Trinidad to London to Africa. Here are the stories from his Somerset Maugham Award-winning Miguel Street, in which he takes us into a derelict corner of Trinidad's capital to meet, among others, Man-Man, who goes from running for public office to staging his own crucifixion. The tales in A Flag on the Island, meanwhile, roam from a Chinese bakery in Trinidad to a rooming house in London. And in the celebrated title story from the Booker Prize- winning In a Free State, an English couple traveling in an unnamed African country discover, under a veneer of civilization, a landscape of squalor and ethnic bloodletting.

No writer has rendered our postcolonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face.

Review Quotes

"V. S. Naipaul is the world's writer, a master of language and perception." --The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

V.S. NAIPAUL was born in Trinidad in 1932. He came to England on a scholarship in 1950. He spent four years at University College, Oxford, and began to write, in London, in 1954. He pursued no other profession.

His novels include A House for Mr Biswas, The Mimic Men, Guerrillas, A Bend in the River, and The Enigma of Arrival. In 1971 he was awarded the Booker Prize for In a Free State. His works of nonfiction, equally acclaimed, include Among the Believers, Beyond Belief, The Masque of Africa, and a trio of books about India: An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now.

In 1990, V.S. Naipaul received a knighthood for services to literature; in 1993, he was the first recipient of the David Cohen British Literature Prize. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. He died in 2018.