Twenty-One Stories

Twenty-One Stories Synopsis

These wide-ranging tales of menace, tragedy, and comedy offer ample proof that ';in the short story, as well as the novel, Graham Greene is the master' (The New York Times). Written between 1929 and 1954, here are twenty-one stories by a ';master storyteller' (Newsweek). Whatever the crime, whatever the pursuit, whatever the moodfrom the tragic and horrifying to the ribald and bittersweet, Graham Greene is ';the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety' (William Golding).

In ';The End of the Party,' a game of hide-and-seek takes a terrifying turn in the dark. In ';The Innocent,' a romantic gets a rude awakening when he finds a hidden keepsake from a childhood crush. A husband's sexual indiscretion is revealed in a most public and embarrassing way in ';The Blue Film.' A rebellious teen's flight from her petit bourgeois life includes a bad boy, a gun, and a plan in ';A Drive in the Country.' In ';A Little Place off the Edgware Road,' a suicidal man's encounter with a stranger in a grubby cinema seals his fate.

A young boy is ushered into a dark world when he discovers the secrets adults hide in ';The Basement Room.' And in ';When Greek Meets Greek,' a clever con between two scoundrels carries an unexpected sting. In these and more than a dozen other stories, Greene confronts his usual themes of betrayal and vengeance, love and hate, faith and doubt, guilt and grief, and pity and pursuit.