Evelyn Waugh’s short fiction reveals in miniaturized perfection the elements that made him the greatest satirist of the twentieth century. The stories collected here range from delightfully barbed portraits of the British upper classes to an alternative ending to Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust; from a missing chapter in the life of Charles Ryder, the nostalgic hero of Brideshead Revisited, to a plot-packed morality tale that Waugh composed at a very tender age; from an epistolary lark in the voice of a young lady of leisure to a darkly comic tale of scandal in a remote (and imaginary) African outpost.

The Complete Stories is a dazzling distillation of Waugh’s genius-abundant evidence that one of the twentieth century’s most admired and enjoyed English novelists was also a master of the short form.