Collected Short Fiction of V. S. Naipaul [Hardcover]

For the first time: the Nobel Prize winner’s stunning short fiction collected in one volume, with an introduction by the author.

Over the course of his distinguished career, V. S. Naipaul has written a remarkable array of short fiction that moves from Trinidad to London to Africa. Here are the stories from his Somerset Maugham Award–winningMiguel Street,in which he takes us into a derelict corner of Trinidad’s capital to meet, among others, Man-Man, who goes from running for public office to staging his own crucifixion. The talesin A Flag on the Island,meanwhile, roam from a Chinese bakery in Trinidad to a rooming house in London. And in the celebrated title story from the Booker Prize– winningIn a Free State,an English couple traveling in an unnamed African country discover, under a veneer of civilization, a landscape of squalor and ethnic bloodletting.

No writer has rendered our postcolonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face.“V. S. Naipaul is the world’s writer, a master of language and perception.” —The New York Times Book ReviewV. S. Naipaulwas born in Trinidad in 1932. He has published more than twenty- five books of fiction and nonfiction and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.From the Introduction

The stories inMiguel Streetwere begun by a man who had everything to learn about writing and himself. The writing ambition had come very early to me, but it had always been only a kind of warm glow inside me, giving me the vaguest idea of what I might do. The writing ambition had come without the wish to do a particular kind of book, and so it stayed for years. I didn't even know in the beginning what kind of writer I might be. Was my gift a comic one or was it profounder? I wrote many stories in the blank period, but nothing like a book announced itself to me. Il“W