Duel Duet - by Graham Greene (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Twenty-two short stories by Graham Greene, arranged in pairs to be read as either a duel or a duet.

A Penguin Classic

Few twentieth-century writers are as celebrated for their craft as Graham Greene, whose acclaimed political thrillers and morally complex characters influenced generations of authors and filmmakers. Greene's explorations of human nature--its harmonies and contradictions--ranged from tales of secret agents, murder, and war to dramas about love and fear, morality and faith. This balance of vigour and virtuosity is also present in Greene's prodigious body of short stories. In this new collection, Pulitzer Prize winner and Graham Greene devotee Yiyun Li arranges a selection of twenty-two classic Graham Greene short stories into pairs, to be read together either as a duel or a duet, offering a new perspective on a writer we thought we knew and the lasting power of his short fiction.

Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

About the Author

GRAHAM GREENE (1904-1991) was one of the twentieth century's most shrewd yet surprising literary figures. An establishment insider who refused to play by establishment rules, Greene maintained a fierce independence of mind while he operated as an MI6 spy under the notorious Soviet double agent Kim Philby, a betrayal that would shape Greene's views on loyalty. His keen understanding of deception fueled masterpieces like The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, The Heart of the Matter, and his legendary cinematic noir The Third Man, which inspired filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and the Coen brothers. Driven by severe bipolar disorder and a youthful habit of playing Russian roulette, Greene spent his life fleeing domestic boredom for the world's most perilous conflict zones, where he witnessed revolution and colonial decline in his wide-ranging travels. A self-described "Catholic agnostic" whose life was a storm of obsessive affairs and opium use, Greene declined to judge his nuanced characters. Where his contemporaries demanded ideological purity, Greene was marked by a resolute unwillingness to take sides--a stance that allowed him to see through political propaganda on both sides of the Cold War--and a complex, deeply personal morality. In lauded works such as Brighton Rock, The Power and The Glory, The End of the Affair, and The Comedians, Greene explored the messy gray area where faith meets human frailty. This refusal to divide the world into heroes and villains birthed a global literary tradition, providing the blueprint for the modern, morally complex political thriller.

Yiyun Li (editor, introducer) is the author of thirteen books of fiction and nonfiction, including most recently Music Against the Night and Things in Nature Merely Grow, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Memoir, the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. She is the recipient of many honors, including the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, an International Writers Award from the Royal Society of Literature, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Windham-Campbell Prize, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Li is the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University.