Complete Short Stories (Penguin Classics Series) »

Known for his espionage thrillers set in exotic locales, Graham Greene is the writer who launched a thousand travel journalists. But although Greene produced some unabashedly commercial works -- he called them "entertainments," to distinguish them from his novels -- even his escapist fiction is rooted in the gritty realities he encountered around the globe.

Affairs, obsessions, ardors, fantasy, myth, legend and dream, fear, pity, and violence—this magnificent collection of stories illuminates all corners of the human experience.

Previously published in two volumes—Collected Short Stories and The Last Word and Other Stories—these forty-nine stories reveal Graham Greene in a range of contrasting moods, sometimes cynical and witty, sometimes searching and philosophical. Each one confirms V. S. Pritchett's statement that Greene is “a master of storytelling.”