ash's pick, Nov 2002, "The Destructors" - pair with screening of Donnie Darko

This one has all the short stories written by Greene ...Some are mind blowing , as you would expect , some great , some good and a few of them obscure , as in totally obscure ...not sure what he is trying to say ...

Nevertheless, it's Greene , so rated 5

Graham Greene = Master storyteller for the intellectual and spiritual/moral minded reader!

Excellent writer! Excellent moralist! Excellent read!

My favorite was A Chance for Mr Lever

After devouring all his short stories and then two of his novels I can assure you that if you do not like reading works that will provoke deep thought on a deep internal level this author is not for you. He attacks humanity and the the toils and spoils constantly from every direction (or bias) and does it without demanding the reader first accept his certain point of view or moral compass. You will be confronted with your own soul and you will be well entertained along the way with extremely well written stories. This is not light reading.

I didn't know he was such a diverse writer. I didn't know he had such a tender side, and he's also very funny. I really, really like how well he describes settings and action because that's a spot with many writers where I get lost, and with Greene, you feel like you are right at his side.

oh wow, oh wow, oh wow

so some stories i didn't like much, as is only natural. Graham Greene himself didn't like some of his stories. and some of those were pretty long--like the one about the kids who destroy the old man's house. i HATED that story, and it was looooong and just... so pointless...

BUT some stories i absolutely LOVED. and they were all so different even if they were all so Greene! there's the dystopian story about the bow-legged kids and people in that island... there's freaking sci fi here!!!! i mean, seriously!! who knew!??! and the lesbian story!!!! Here you have one of those authors for whom women are... they're somehow... women are not something that he understands and they're not subjects in their own right in his writing, they are there for the men in his stories, and it seems as if they were there for him (or against him or about him, but not as peers, not as "companions in equality" because they are different, it seems, to Greene... well, men are different, to me. like Greene, i don't get the opposite sex, i do not comprehend the opposite sex, everything they do and everything they don't do is inexplicable, and if i wrote novels and stories, my "men" would probably be there as objects for the female characters: they would complement the stories i could tell through the women's eyes... the difference is, i think, that my incomprehension does not make me believe that men are, somehow, objects... My lack of understanding does not lead me to believe that men and women are somehow different species, just, different...

And then Greene has these women in this story!!! It's like, a whole new window into the man...

This book was so much fun, so much fun!!!! It made me appreciate Graham Greene even more than i already do, which is a lot, really, come to think of it... He is my favorite misogynist author in the whole world!

Top rate short stories by a master of the novel.

For me, I find that the short stories of certain authors are largely preferable over their novels. Two quick examples come to mind: T.C. Boyle and Conan Doyle (over both his Holmes' novellas and his tedious medieval romances, which he hoped he'd be most famous for).

Graham Greene is the opposite. I much prefer his novels to his short stories.

Not much to say about this one, except read-it-if-you-can. Greene has a lot of range and has certainly mastered storytelling; if there is a flaw in these stories, it is that they are a little too much of their place and time, making it easy to roll one's eye at yet another English life of quiet desperation, or to scoff at a time when ne'er-do-wells could thumb their nose at the law and not get gunned down for it out of spite.

Definitely not going to pick favorites out of these, though a few were pointless and a couple overstayed their welcome. This was a tome I savored for many months whenever other reading was hard-going, and I am a little melancholy to have finished it.

What began as a casual interest in a single short story by one of those fringe authors you hear about in British Literature classes quickly morphed into a buffet of delightful late-night reading.

Greene is best read at night. Preferably with the window cracked, a quiet howl shimmying its way through the mountains, and yellow lamplight guiding the way.

While most stories contain a highly stylized death, they hardly veer into the satirical 1001 ways to die territory. No, Greene would likely have scoffed at the idea of that TV show. But somehow snuck his way into the writers room to snag an idea or two for his next batch of stories.

Yes, death is a theme. But what else is there to write about than our universal equal?

Stories like "The Blue Film" and "A Little Place off the Edgware Road" approach the flair of surrealism and individual voyuerism common with modern literature.

Greene's longer stories are splendid. Though, they do feel more like novels pared down to story form rather than stories kept within the narrower point of view.

Much of literary criticism focuses on mood. And with good reason. Though, there's more to mood than stopping at how it makes the reader feel, think or see. For Greene, and many of the great British writers before and behind him, it's about those specific moods that surround the characters before, during and after we readers find them in their individual stories.

I'm behind on my magazine-reading and movie-watching, so figured I could try short stories for a while.

(update) Ok, I only read 2 or 3 stories before I had to turn it in. Maybe I'll try again sometime.

3 or 4 less than superb out of 50? a master. i still hold that greene’s novels are his forte, but the stories are, with few exceptions, superb.

3.5 stars.

Reading "Complete Short Stories" by Graham Greene was a bit tediously challenging since he has penned his own style in terms of his narration, setting, humor, etc. However, I don't claim I enjoyed all of his 53 stories collected into the following five topics: Twenty-One Stories (21), A Sense of Reality (4), May We Borrow Your Husband? (12), The Last Word and Other Stories (12) and Newly Collected (4). Rather, I found most of them arguably readable while some few fairly manageable. One of the reasons is that, I think, I couldn't fathom to deepen my better understanding due to the context itself of the story in question. Probably I would reread that with more information to clarify any ambiguity I might encounter.

Coming to look at the bright side, I'd like to encourage Greene newcomers to have a try by reading any story that looks appealingly interesting because we can find "Graham Greene in a range of contrasting moods, sometimes cynical and witty, sometimes searching and philosophical." (back cover) Eventually, we would soon find reading him so uniquely amazing and inspiring that we can't help wondering how he has done so fantastically. For instance, I found reading his "May we borrow your husband?" subtly humorous and critical from its 8 parts, 27-odd pages; the story depicting a newly-wed young couple (Peter and Poopy) who obviously look unhappy as observed by the narrator (William) and a duo of seemingly mischievous young men (Stephen and Tony) as social acquaintances who have gradually involved in their affair.

This extract may give us some ideas on the ensuing conflict:

Tony detected the smile. 'A regular body-snatcher,' he said. My breakfast and the young man arrived at the same moment before I had time to reply. As he passed the table I could feel the tension.
'Cuir de Russie,' Stephen said, quivering a nostril. 'A mistake of inexperience.'
The youth caught the words as he went past and turned with an astonished look to see who had spoken, and they both smiled insolently back at him as though they really believed they had the power to take him over ...
For the first time I felt disquiet. (pp. 308-309)

We may wonder how come, in terms of such a roguishly humorous title, and it's a relief to find it in this extract:

And then Stephen produced the master-plan. I could tell it was coming by the way his hands stiffened on his coffee-cup, by the way Tony lowered his eyes and appeared to be praying over his croissant. "We were wondering, Poopy -- may we borrow your husband?" I have never heard words spoken with more elaborate casualness.
She laughed. She hadn't noticed a thing. 'Borrow my husband?'
... (p. 318)

Eventually, it's a bit challenging for us as readers to guess in mind how the end would be and we would soon realize that Greene's ending is different from Maugham's in that he has left his readers to reflect further or judge it ourselves like this story.