Complete Short Stories by graham greene

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

Graham Greene had a wicked sense of humor which is clearly shown in several of his short stories. He was an incredibility talented writer and he painted pictures with his words. I highly recommend this collection of stories. The few stories that are not up to par are far outweighed by the many gems contained in this volume. Many of these stories are ones that you will want to read again.

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Cigarkirby

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

An absolutely exquisite collection of short stories. In the same realm as Nabokov--less fantastical, though somehow more "out there." An excellent read.

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kitykat288

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

solid short stories that compensate for his weak novels

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Matsuma_

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

Difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.

I love Graham Greene's writing and rate many of his novels amongst the finest of the 20th century for wit, depth, humour and meaning. Many of the short stories reflect those qualities and were absolutely pleasant to read and left me unable to read the subsequent one until I had digested the meaning of the proceedindg one.

That said, there were unfortunately too many that left me feeling dry, unimpressed or disconnected from the characters and the story. Because this is a collection of short stories, why didn't I, you may ask, skip to the next? Well, because it is a collection of short stories. It is difficult to separate the chaff from the wheat until you are well into, or nearly finished the story.

The book is a collection of 54 short stories divided into 5 categories:

1) 21 Stories
2) A Sense of Reality
3) May We Borrow Your Husband
4) The Last Word and Other Stories
5) Newly Collected

The Introduction by Pico Iyer is completely forgetable and Michale Gorra's suggestions for further reading was similarly useless. On the strength of the short stories, this is four stars, but the Introduction, Suggested Further Reading and the binding drop the value of the book. At 600 pages, this is too long for such a flimsy Penguin Paperback and I anticipate the book falling to pieces rather quickly.

That said, the short stories can be roughly divided up into four categories:

1) Catholic Pessimism (like The Power and the Glory)
2) Political/business travel satire (Dr Fischer or the Bomb Party would be a good example of this type)
3) Romance and infidelity (similar to The End of the Affair)
4) Chaff

Now the lines are not always clear, some stories (such as The Blessing) straddle two categories, much like Our Man in Havanna is has both aspects of Catholic pessimism and business/political satire. Often these are the best stories as they combine the theological reflection on existence with a comedic situation leaving the reader both amused and reflective.

The only problem is the reader needs to read them for themselves in order to decide what belongs in the fourth category.

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_White_Lotus_

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

Yikes, some of this did not age well. Some enjoyably "Graham Greene" stories, though.

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dkchacha

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

Before this collection I was only familiar with Greene's work by way of "The Destructors." That is certainly a miracle of a short story, but I did not know Greene's range and ability as a storyteller. He certainly can tell a good story and this collection has it all. I love how this collection binds together Greene's four collections in their original order, adding on a few unpublished stories at the end. When an author collects stories together there is a larger meaning that arises than that of the individual components. If you just jam all an author's stories together all randomly you lose that larger meaning. This book, however, presents the larger perspective that is the scope of Greene's entire short work while still preserving the vision of those individual collections. It is a good introduction to Greene. I will have to look into his novels.

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