Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780140186123
ISBN number: 0140186123
Label: Penguin Classics
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 368
Printing Date: April 01, 1993
Publishing house: Penguin Classics
Sale Popularity Level: 775894
Studio: Penguin Classics
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Rated by buyers 
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Graham Greene just doesn't get the recognition he deserves as a short story writer. As a novelist, his reputation has been well-established, fortunately. This collection, which incorporates "Twenty-One Stories", "A Sense of Reality", and "May We Borrow Your Husband" is a fine sampler of Greene's abilities in the shorter genre. Many of the elements that feature so prominently in his novels also figure in these stories: the spontaneity of violence; ruthless polictics; looming secrets; greed; and the complex situations that life drops on you.
Here are some brief looks at my favorite stories:
"The Destructors" is Greene's examination of horrific, calculated vandalism in the extreme, made even more horrifying by the coolness with which it is carried out.
An event in a man's past comes back to haunt him in "The Blue Film". Strangely, the haunting specter doesn't frighten him so much as saddens him.
"The End of the Party" is a harrowing tale of identical twins playing hide and seek at a party. The ending paragraph left goosebumps on my skin for days.
Other stories, such as "A Shocking Accident" and "May We Borrow Your Husband" are superb examples of this great story teller's talents.
For those who have never read Graham Greene, "Collected Short Stories" ought to be your starting point.
Rated by buyers -
Graham Greene is one of those authors like Hemingway who may "go out of style" --this will be a great pity--there transparant but subtle modernism of the very first half of the very first half of the century Greene and Waugh will go out of style. Already they are being replaced by a Rushdie sense of the text as an elaborate joke or rather elaborate shape.
These are wonderful stories and like Poe's should be preserved and cherished.
Rated by buyers -
Although I can't recall all the details regarding this book I keep a strong sensation of pleasure when I think of it. Stories are transparent, deep and at times funny. My favorite one is "May we borrow your husband?". Here the author skillfully describes a grotesque situation in wich an homosexual couple attemps by all means to have an encounter with the flamboyant husband of a just married couple. He starts telling the story as a distant witness and as time goes by he gets unwillingly involved in the whole mise en scene. Greene has a mastery to blend irony with deep feelings and awkward situations. The result is wonderful!
Rated by buyers 
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It is fear which dominates these stories. It may be the fear of the afterlife as we in see in the Second Death or fear of darkness as the story The End of the Party reveals. In the very first story, Greene's Catholic faith coems to the forefront though the omniscient author feigns disbelief and uses a neutral tone, there is no doubt that he is sharing his friend's fear of hell. The latter has had a near death experience and has seen Christ who knows everything about him. Now that death is inevitable, he feels that he has not heeded the very first warning and that now he is on his way to hell. Sometimes, I ask, was Greene himself terribly afraid of death well knowing that he was not living up to the moral standards required by his beliefs? Did his conversion at the age of twenty two weigh hevaily on his conscience and so he had to return to the scenario of a visit to hell time and again?
As I have already remarked soemtiems the fear stems from other sources. In The End of the Party the adults fail to understand that darkness may not go down well with everyone. The game of hide and seek, though entirely innocent, proves fatal as one of the children simply cannot stand being in the dark. Greene is hindting at the adults' failure to understand the individual child's psychology and our general tendency to categorize without distinguishing individual traits which may make all the difference.
In 'A Little Place Off the Edgeware Road|" the fear stems from a particular character's difficulty to retain his sanity. In a dark cinema, he feels a clammy hand touching his. He quickly comes to the conclusion that the man is a murderer and rings up the police. The twist at the end is characteristically Greenelike: the police come to pick our unfortunate character rather than the presumed murderer.
Rated by buyers 
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The plots of these stories are real enough to keep them believable, but they are not quite a product of normal life, which makes them interesting. These stories along with most of his other works put the reader in a place that has been called Greeneland. Like Greenland it is a real place on earth but it is different from any other and few people have experienced it. These stories come from the mind of a man who traveled the world and accurately observed its inhabitants in the mid part of this century. Greene also experienced much of what he saw and his stories are not written from a disinterested point of view. His style is very often brilliant (The Blue Movie),his topics are current, and his themes are universal.
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