An inventorĬreates a machine that can dance with all the girls at new society balls,īut the results are far from satisfactory. Jerome first published The Dancing Partner three years The payment system is being updated, if you wish to order please email: Dancingįamous for his classic, comic novel Three Men in a Boat (1889), whichĭescribes a rowing holiday on the Thames enjoyed by three men and theirĭog, Jerome K. The Gift of Magi is one of O Henry's most celebrated stories. In The Ransom of Red Chief two outlaws kidnap an unruly child and soon come to regret it. O Henry's humorous and ingenius plots soon earned him a reputation as one of the most popular short story writers of his day. He was convicted on a charge of embezzlement in 1896 and wrote his first short stories from prison. "Bella Fleace" is dated Dec 1932 (UK) and Mar 1933 (US).O Henry, whose real name was William Sydney Porter, was born in South Carolina, USA.
*The stories are given chronologically in my collection, so although the publication date for "Incident in Azania" is listed as Dec 1933, I'm almost certain the year is misprinted. Sep 1934), I recommend reading it in the novel. Since Waugh later incorporated it into A Handful of Dust (pubd. The Man Who Liked Dickens: I won't say much about this justifiably famous story (Sep-Nov 1933). Unfortunately, in the audiobook version I'm using (Hatchette), the performer misreads the punctuation of the young lady's trademark phrase, "Goodness how Sad." ★★★★★ Part of the joy of this story is in the contrast between the ditsy correspondent and the ancient Bella Fleace (to whom letters are also rather important). ★★★★★Ĭruise: Letters from a Young Lady of Leisure: fantastic epistolary humor once again we meet a unique voice. (Only a kind of magnanimity, for Miss Fleace, like all of Waugh's protagonists, is not without her prejudices.) You will not expect the biggest laugh. Like "The Manager of 'The Kremlin'" and "A House of Gentlefolk," this story also celebrates what I called "cultured profligacy," though this time it is clearly a kind of magnanimity. She is not, as I had falsely remembered from an earlier reading, an object of pity. ★★★★★īella Fleace Gave a Party: Another first-rate comic story, which evokes a real sense of place (Irish countryside) and delivers a memorable and (remarkably, given the brevity) complex central figure, the eighty-year old lady of the title. This last item, the intervention by the British press (whom Waugh will lacerate in a later novel, Scoop) takes the story to new heights of hilarity. As always, the varied voices are the choicest pleasures of the story: the British men in their club, the British matrons counseling Prunella (the nubile subject of the "incident"), Youkoumian's pidgin English, Prunella's letters to her father, the journalist's phony newspaper story.
To truly appreciate the slippery Mr Youkoumian (especially the studied ambiguity of his remark, "E got the thousand pounds for Joab"), you must get to know him in the novel, where he is paired with a 'civilized' counterpart, the dashing and thoroughly bad Basil Seal.
It is an excellent story on its own, but your delight will be deepened if you read the novel first. It was partly modeled on Waugh's travels across east Africa in the early 30s. "Incident" revisits a 'zany' imaginary country that Waugh used for his third novel, Black Mischief (October 1932). But the very next one he published, Incident in Azania (December 1932*) is dramatically better. July 1832), with which I ended last time, was Waugh's first great short story. Today I'll do four, to reach an even ten, and aim at five each for the remaining posts.Įach of today's stories is excellent. In the first installment I summed up six stories. With 25 stories to tackle, I've decided to break this review into parts.