Short Fiction
Saki (1870–1916), 1904
Edwardian England seen from the side: a talking cat, a private childhood god, and a socialist who enjoys her money. Saki’s wit is a scalpel with a smile. Saki's Edwardian sketches move with a light, satirical step, then slip into unease or lyric wonder when the animal or child's view takes over.
Feels like unease and wonder. About society.
Who it’s for
You may enjoy these if you like dry social comedy with a strange, fable-like edge and don't mind stories that end on a prick of discomfort. Some pieces lean on Edwardian social codes and period vocabulary, so a few jokes can need a little context.
Why read it
These stories give you a sharp, playful way to see Edwardian manners from the side, with animals and children exposing the absurdity adults miss.
Pages from the book
What a wild animal loses when we call its cage a home.
“In a few cases only. Nothing will make me believe that an acre or so of concrete enclosure will make up to a wolf or a tiger-cat for the range of night prowling that would belong to it in a wild state. Think of the dictionary of sound and scent and recollection that unfolds before a real wild beast as it comes out from its lair every evening, with the knowledge that in a few minutes it will be hieing along to some distant hunting ground where all the joy and fury of the chase awaits it; think of the crowded sensations of the brain when every rustle, every cry, every bent twig, and every whiff across the nostrils means something, something to do with life and death and dinner. The hour when failure can walk the streets unrecognised.
The scene pleased Gortsby and harmonised with his present mood. Dusk, to his mind, was the hour of the defeated. Men and women, who had fought and lost, who hid their fallen fortunes and dead hopes as far as possible from the scrutiny of the curious, came forth in this hour of gloaming, when their shabby clothes and bowed shoulders and unhappy eyes might pass unnoticed, or, at any rate, unrecognised. The private pleasures of a child who has learned to hide his hatred.
Mrs. de Ropp would never, in her honestest moments, have confessed to herself that she disliked Conradin, though she might have been dimly aware that thwarting him “for his good” was a duty which she did not find particularly irksome. Conradin hated her with a desperate sincerity which he was perfectly able to mask. Such few pleasures as he could contrive for himself gained an added relish from the likelihood that they would be displeasing to his guardian, and from the realm of his imagination she was locked out—an unclean thing, which should find no entrance. Saki.Saki was born Hector Hugh Munro in Burma and raised in Devon by his grandmother and aunts; he enlisted at 43 and was killed by a sniper in 1916.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Short Fiction for me?
- You may enjoy these if you like dry social comedy with a strange, fable-like edge and don't mind stories that end on a prick of discomfort. Some pieces lean on Edwardian social codes and period vocabulary, so a few jokes can need a little context.
- What is Short Fiction like?
- Saki's Edwardian sketches move with a light, satirical step, then slip into unease or lyric wonder when the animal or child's view takes over. Feels like unease and wonder. About society.
- What should I read after Short Fiction?
- If you liked Short Fiction, try The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton), Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift) and Journey to the Center of the Earth (Jules Verne).
A taste of the feed
Seeing your own dinner party through a guest's eyes, and wishing you hadn't.
That was the secret of his way of readjusting her vision. Lily, turning her eyes from him, found herself scanning her little world through his retina: it was as though the pink lamps had been shut off and the dusty daylight let in. She looked down the long table, studying its occupants one by one, from Gus Trenor, with his heavy carnivorous head sunk between his shoulders, as he preyed on a jellied plover, to his wife, at the opposite end of the long bank of orchids, suggestive, with her glaring good-looks, of a jeweller’s window lit by electricity. And between the two, what a long stretch of vacuity! How dreary and trivial these people were!
The House of Mirth · Edith Wharton
Can the maker of the gentlest creature also have made the fiercest?
What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp? When the stars threw down their spears, And watered heaven with their tears, Did He smile His work to see? Did He who made the lamb make thee? Tiger, tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Songs of Innocence and of Experience · William Blake
The injury that lasts longer than a blow: being looked through.
I was standing by the billiard-table and in my ignorance blocking up the way, and he wanted to pass; he took me by the shoulders and without a word—without a warning or explanation—moved me from where I was standing to another spot and passed by as though he had not noticed me. I could have forgiven blows, but I could not forgive his having moved me without noticing me.
Notes from Underground · Fyodor Dostoevsky
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