The first Penguin edition of Peter Carey’s Collected Stories, with a cover by Michael Leunig

Collected Stories combines the brilliant, bizarre, funny, chilling pieces originally published in The Fat Man in History and War Crimes (plus three stories not in either). Those from Fat Man posit what-ifs, with the title story wondering how, were some post-Marxist utopia to declare obesity counter-revolutionary, a household of fat men would strike back. Those from War Crimes are all in one way or another about power - those who wield it, those who want it, and those who recall only its dazzling exhilaration and degradation.