Stories

A selection of short prose works – veritable prose poems – published in various Swiss and German newspapers during the sombre second decade of the 20th century by the very gifted Swiss poet and writer Robert Walser (1878-1956), author of the memorable story The Promenade, similar in spirit and tone to all of these charming texts.
An e-book, with the original German-language texts in an annex, is available below.
The original German-language texts can also be seen here. (…)

A diner in the restaurant of a gentleman’s club in London is scandalized by the uncommonly inattentive and distracted behavior of his waiter, and although gentlemen mustn’t be seen talking to or in any way taking an interest in members of the lower classes such as waiters, the gentleman in question in the course of reprimanding the waiter does find out rather a lot about his dramatic domestic situation, and even manages willy-nilly to do something about it.
A potent satire of the rigid (…)

The celebrated prose poem about his memories of Christmas in his native Wales by the immortal author of Fern Hill, Do Not Go Silent Into That Dark Night, And Death Shall Have No Dominion and many other unforgettable poems.
It was written in 1945 to be read by the author on a cultural program of the BBC, but the powers in place finally declined to let the unpredictable, unconventional and uncontrollable poet read it on the air, and it was first published in 1950 in the American magazine (…)

The narrator relates how, in the middle of a conversation with other travellers on a train about the double modern moral standards for men and women, he had met the celebrated Posdnicheff, who had recently been acquitted for the murder of his wife because she had been unfaithful to him (dixit P). The rest of the story is P’s account of his life with his wife, his growing suspicions about her relationship with a suave and very brilliant fellow musician after he comes to a reception given by (…)

The narrator is a social misfit of forty who ruminates at length on his defects and his endless humiliating experiences and conflicts, for he is a (Russian) intellectual with great sensitivity and a particularly acute sense of the failings of the modern world and of everyone in it, especially himself.
The tone is set from the first sentence that says it all (“I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man.”) and rapidly scales the height of self-denigration as he describes his miserable life and (…)

The first work published by Rudyard Kipling, an outstanding and deceptively light-hearted collection of stories about life in India/Pakistan under British control in the latter part of the 19th century.
(73,000 words)
An e-book is available for downloading below. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. LISPETH. 2. THREE AND—AN EXTRA. 3. THROWN AWAY. 4. MISS YOUGHAL’S SAIS. 5. YOKED WITH AN UNBELIEVER. 6. FALSE DAWN. 7. THE RESCUE OF PLUFFLES. 8. CUPID’S ARROWS. 9. HIS CHANCE IN LIFE. 10. WATCHES (…)

The Colonel Chabert had played a heroic role in Napoleon’s victory at the battle of Eylau but had been left for dead on the battlefield under his horse, his body thrown into a collective burial pit, and he’d been declared legally deceased. However, he managed to revive and to survive although a great many months had passed before he’d sufficiently recovered to be able to consider returning to the post-Napoleonic Paris and recover his estate and his belongings. But as he’d been declared (…)

A young painter – who we soon discover to be the future world-famous Nicolas Poussin [1] – pays a visit to the studio of a celebrated master, Porbus, where he is admitted behind a rather strange old man who has also come to visit the master, whose works he proceeds to ruthlessly criticize for their lack of life and truthfulness. This visitor turns out to be an unknown master painter himself, who passionately describes the magnificent masterpiece that he has almost but not quite finished for (…)

Two children go over into the neighbouring valley high up in the Austrian Alps to visit their grandmother on the day before Christmas and get lost on their way back when a terrible snowstorm unexpectedly hits the whole region and covers up not only their tracks but all the recognizable landmarks that usually guide them on their way.
A story about life in the mountains, a story about the diverse and ever-changing environment in the mountains, a story about Christmas in the mountains and the (…)

This famous story manages in a mysterious way to create an intriguing atmosphere of significance, even if the narrator’s mysticism and his unbounded admiration of the long-sought-after figure of Kurtz, a European trader of ivory in the upper reaches of what is clearly the Congo River who only appears towards the end of the story, is not to everyone’s taste in these more down-to-earth days.
And the rather complacent description of the ugliness and violence and racism of colonialism in what (…)