Complete Stories

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

The short stories of Kingsley Amis - the great master of post-war comic prose - are dark, playful, moving, surprising and extremely funny. This definitive collection gathers all Amis's short fiction in a single volume for the first time and encompasses five decades of storytelling. In 'The 2003 Claret', written in 1958, a time machine is invented for the weighty task of sending a man to 2010 to discover what the booze will taste like. In 'Boris and the Colonel' a Cambridge spy is unearthed in the sleepy English countryside with the help of a plucky horse, while In 'Mason's Life' two men meet inside their respective dreams. The collection spans many genres, offering ingenious alternative histories, mystery and horror, satirical reflections and a devilishly funny attacks. Amis's stories reveal the scope of his imagination and the warmth beneath his acerbic humour, and they all share the unmistakable style and wit of one of Britain's best loved writers.

© Kingsley Amis 2011 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Critics Review

  • A key figure in postwar British culture, whose importance and influence cannot be measured … distinctive and original

    David Lodge
  • ‘Among the English comic masters of the twentieth century’

    Guardian
  • A ceaselessly fresh and adorable body of work … exasperation made poetry

    Julie Burchill
  • Kingsley Amis was a big, humane novelist, interested in all manner of people very unlike himself

    Philip Hensher

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