The Best Short Stories - Couverture souple

"Small wonders"
--"Time Out London"
"I wanted them all, even those I'd already read."
--Ron Rosenbaum, "The New York Observer"

Sean Barrett's reading goes beyond narration into performance in The Man Who Would Be King, a novella in Conradian vein. He begins gently enough as the Indian civil servant who recounts his first meeting with Peachey Carnehan and Daniel Dravot, 'gentlemen at large', who are planning to carve out a kingdom for themselves in a remote corner of Afghanistan. Barrett then creates the colourful personalities of the conniving Peachey and the bombastic, red-bearded Daniel before they disappear up country. Four years later Peachey reappears, a 'rag-wrapped, whining cripple', and tells the story of their meteoric rise and even faster fall. Kipling's storytelling and Barrett's reading is so immediate that you feel he's actually in the fanatically idolatrous mountain kingdom, living the perils of the protagonists. Other macabre stories in the collection include The Phantom Rickshaw, The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes and The Mark of the Beast. --- Christina Hardyment, The Times

"I wanted them all, even those I'd already read."
Ron Rosenbaum, "The New York Observer"
"Small wonders."
"Time Out London"
"""[F]irst-rate astutely selected and attractively packaged indisputably great works."
Adam Begley, "The New York Observer"
"I ve always been haunted by Bartleby, the proto-slacker. But it s the handsomely minimalist cover of the Melville House edition that gets me here, one of many in the small publisher s fine 'Art of the Novella' series."
"The New Yorker"
"The Art of the Novella series is sort of an anti-Kindle. What these singular, distinctive titles celebrate is book-ness. They're slim enough to be portable but showy enough to be conspicuously consumed tiny little objects that demand to be loved for the commodities they are."
KQED (NPR San Francisco)
"Some like it short, and if you're one of them, Melville House, an independent publisher based in Brooklyn, has a line of books for you... elegant-looking paperback editions ...a good read in a small package."
" ---The Wall Street Journal

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist.

Kipling's works of fiction include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888). His poems include "Mandalay" (1890), "Gunga Din" (1890), "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" (1919), "The White Man's Burden" (1899), and "If—" (1910). He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story; his children's books are classics of children's literature, and one critic described his work as exhibiting "a versatile and luminous narrative gift".

Kipling was one of the most popular writers in the United Kingdom, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Henry James said: "Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known." In 1907, at the age of 41, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and its youngest recipient to date. He was also sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, both of which he declined.

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907 "in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world-famous author."

Kipling kept writing until the early 1930s, but at a slower pace and with much less success than before. On the night of 12 January 1936, Kipling suffered a haemorrhage in his small intestine. He underwent surgery, but died less than a week later on 18 January 1936 at the age of 70 of a perforated duodenal ulcer. Kipling's death had in fact previously been incorrectly announced in a magazine, to which he wrote, "I've just read that I am dead. Don't forget to delete me from your list of subscribers."