Take a decent helping of P.G. Wodehouse, a soupçon of Wilde's epigrammatic wit, then season with the bloodthirsty malevolence of Edward Lear and Roald Dahl, and you will have an approximation of the inimitable genius of Hector Hugo Munro (alias Saki), the most hilarious and savage exponent of the short story in the English language. His flawlessly-etched cautionary tales, which invariably involve wild animals, tell of country parties where upper-class twits and bores meet with fittingly macabre accidents, where the children are always beastly, and where his urbane and naughty young heroes get the better of their peers using barbed sarcasm and elaborate hoaxes. Saki exposes his upper-crust guests to the menace of Nature—always perched, just out of sight, waiting to claim its next victim.

A revaluation of the work of the popular Edwardian short story writer, novelist, journalist, blackest of black humorists, and master of the sting in the tale, Saki (H.H. Munro).

Understanding Will Self introduces readers to the satire and expressive ingenuity of a British writer who has garnered an array of awards since the 1991 publication of his first short story collection, The Quantity Theory of Sanity. In this guide to the well-received but largely unstudied writer, M. Hunter Hayes examines the key themes, narrative strategies, and cultural commentaries that characterize Self's work. Through close textual analyses, Hayes guides readers through the alternative universe of Self's writing and maps the interplay between his forays into journalism and fiction. Marked by their combination of seemingly improbable events and quotidian details, Self's novels, novellas, and short stories examine contemporary English life through a mode of writing that he has aptly termed dirty magical realism. Hayes shows how recurring characters have evolved through successive works and in relation with their environments.

In response to the escalating need for up-to-date information on writers, Contemporary Authors® New Revision Series brings researchers the most recent data on the world's most-popular authors. These exciting and unique author profiles are essential to your holdings because sketches are entirely revised and up-to-date, and completely replace the original Contemporary Authors® entries. For your convenience, a soft-cover cumulative index is sent biannually.While Gale strives to replicate print content, some content may not be available due to rights restrictions.Call your Sales Rep for details.

With Authors & Artists for Young Adults teens have a source where they can discover fascinating and entertaining facts about the writers, artists, film directors, graphic novelists, and other creative personalities that most interest them. International in scope, each volume contains 20-25 entries offering personal behind-the-scenes information, portraits, movie stills, bibliographies, a cumulative index and more. For table of contents or other volume specific information see the entry for the volume.

Although he gained fame with his classic novel series, Alms for Oblivion, which chronicled the misdeeds of English society in the 1950s and 60s, Simon Raven is also recognized as a brilliant travel writer, an unblinking reporter of the seamier side of English upper-class life, and a hilarious commentator on the sexual mores of gay London. His demise in 2001 robbed English letters of one of its most colorful characters. Expelled from Charterhouse “for the usual thing,” he was, for a time, an officer in the British Army. He gambled heavily on the horses for years, was often in debt, drank too much, and had a rich and uncommonly varied sex life. He was said to possess “the mind of a cad and the pen of an angel,” and this selection of his writing contains a magnificent array of pieces on army life, sex, school days, and travel. The quality of his writing and his fearless descriptions of the habits of the English, and indeed of all mankind, will come as a revelation.