Maugham's Choice of Kipling's Best
by Rudyard Kipling 
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Somerset Maugham, an apprentice of sorts to Rudyard Kipling, has collected the master’s best short stories in this indispensable collection. Somerset Maugham, aprendiz de Rudyard Kipling, ha coleccionado los mejores cuentos del maestro en esta colección indispensable.Tags
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Maugham's Choice of Kipling's Best is a collection of sixteen short stories by Rudyard Kipling, as selected by W. Somerset Maugham, who has also contributed an introductory essay to this collection.
I found this to be a wonderful and fascinating collection of short stories. Kipling was a masterful story-teller, something that is evident on nearly every page of this collection. The stories are diverse in their settings, primarily India but also England and the United States. Similarly there is wide variety in the types of characters and the situations of their lives.
Three of the stories I enjoyed the most were "The Finest Story In The World," The Man Who Would Be King, and The Village That Voted The Earth Was Flat. Here is just one show more example of the wonderful way in which Kipling uses the English language: "There was neither sky, sun, nor horizon, -nothing but a brown purple haze of heat. It was as though the earth were dying of apoplexy."
This is an excellent collection of short stories and I highly commend it. Most books I read and pass on to another home. This volume will remain here for future enjoyment, although it is available for loan. show less
I found this to be a wonderful and fascinating collection of short stories. Kipling was a masterful story-teller, something that is evident on nearly every page of this collection. The stories are diverse in their settings, primarily India but also England and the United States. Similarly there is wide variety in the types of characters and the situations of their lives.
Three of the stories I enjoyed the most were "The Finest Story In The World," The Man Who Would Be King, and The Village That Voted The Earth Was Flat. Here is just one show more example of the wonderful way in which Kipling uses the English language: "There was neither sky, sun, nor horizon, -nothing but a brown purple haze of heat. It was as though the earth were dying of apoplexy."
This is an excellent collection of short stories and I highly commend it. Most books I read and pass on to another home. This volume will remain here for future enjoyment, although it is available for loan. show less
Rudyard Kipling no escribió más que una novela, y ni siquiera la escribió solo, sino en colaboración con su cuñado y agente, Wolcott Balestrier. No obstante, los relatos que escribió se cuentan por centenares, y entre ellos hay un puñado digno de figurar por derecho propio en las antologías más exigentes del género.
Mar 6, 2022Spanish
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Kipling, who as a novelist dramatized the ambivalence of the British colonial experience, was born of English parents in Bombay and as a child knew Hindustani better than English. He spent an unhappy period of exile from his parents (and the Indian heat) with a harsh aunt in England, followed by the public schooling that inspired his "Stalky" show more stories. He returned to India at 18 to work on the staff of the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette and rapidly became a prolific writer. His mildly satirical work won him a reputation in England, and he returned there in 1889. Shortly after, his first novel, The Light That Failed (1890) was published, but it was not altogether successful. In the early 1890s, Kipling met and married Caroline Balestier and moved with her to her family's estate in Brattleboro, Vermont. While there he wrote Many Inventions (1893), The Jungle Book (1894-95), and Captains Courageous (1897). He became dissatisfied with life in America, however, and moved back to England, returning to America only when his daughter died of pneumonia. Kipling never again returned to the United States, despite his great popularity there. Short stories form the greater portion of Kipling's work and are of several distinct types. Some of his best are stories of the supernatural, the eerie and unearthly, such as "The Phantom Rickshaw," "The Brushwood Boy," and "They." His tales of gruesome horror include "The Mark of the Beast" and "The Return of Imray." "William the Conqueror" and "The Head of the District" are among his political tales of English rule in India. The "Soldiers Three" group deals with Kipling's three musketeers: an Irishman, a Cockney, and a Yorkshireman. The Anglo-Indian Tales, of social life in Simla, make up the larger part of his first four books. Kipling wrote equally well for children and adults. His best-known children's books are Just So Stories (1902), The Jungle Books (1894-95), and Kim (1901). His short stories, although their understanding of the Indian is often moving, became minor hymns to the glory of Queen Victoria's empire and the civil servants and soldiers who staffed her outposts. Kim, an Irish boy in India who becomes the companion of a Tibetan lama, at length joins the British Secret Service, without, says Wilson, any sense of the betrayal of his friend this actually meant. Nevertheless, Kipling has left a vivid panorama of the India of his day. In 1907, Kipling became England's first Nobel Prize winner in literature and the only nineteenth-century English poet to win the Prize. He won not only on the basis of his short stories, which more closely mirror the ambiguities of the declining Edwardian world than has commonly been recognized, but also on the basis of his tremendous ability as a popular poet. His reputation was first made with Barrack Room Ballads (1892), and in "Recessional" he captured a side of Queen Victoria's final jubilee that no one else dared to address. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Rudyard Kipling has a Legacy Library. Legacy libraries are the personal libraries of famous readers, entered by LibraryThing members from the Legacy Libraries group.
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Maugham's Choice of Kipling's Best
- Original title
- A Choice of Kipling's Prose
- Original publication date
- 1952
- Original language
- English
- Disambiguation notice
- ''A Choice of Kipling's Prose, Selected And With An Introductory Essay By W Somerset Maugham'' (Macmillan, 1952) and ''Maugham's Choice of Kipling's Best'' (Doubleday, 1953) are the same work. Rudyard Kipling is the actual au... (show all)thor
There is a Faber edition of Kipling's Prose selected, and with an introduction, by Craig Raine. If only by virtue of the substantial introduction it is not the same work as this Macmillan / Doubleday selection of 16 stories made by W. Somerset Maugham in 1952. Please keep the two separate. There is also a risk of autocombination with the selection of Kipling's verse by T S Eliot.
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- Reviews
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- Rating
- (3.78)
- Languages
- English, Spanish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 4
- ASINs
- 11
