In this unique collection of short stories composed between 1910-62, Evelyn Waugh's early juvenilia are brought together with later pieces, some of which became the inspirations for his novels. "Mr Loveday's Little Outing" is a blackly comic tale of a mental asylum and its favourite resident; "Cruise" sees a hilarious series of letters from a naive young woman as she travels with her family; "A House of Gentlefolks" observes a group of elderly eccentric aristocrats and their young heir; and, in "The Sympathetic Passenger" a radio-loathing retiree picks up exactly the wrong hitchhiker. These witty and immaculately crafted stories display the finest writing of a master of satire and comic twists.

"As a writer of satiric and comic stories, Evelyn Waugh remains unmatched among modern writers." -New York Times Book Review
For the first time, all of Evelyn Waugh's stories-thirty-nine marvelous works of short fiction spanning his entire career-are brought together in a single volume. The result: a book of brilliant entertainments.
The stories range from delightfully barbed portraits of the British upper classes to a one in which Waugh suggests an alternative ending to his novel A Handful of Dust; from a "missing chapter" in the life of Charles Ryder, the nostalgic hero of Brideshead Revisited, to two long, linked stories, remnants of an abandoned novel that Waugh himself considered "my best writing"; from a plot-packed morality tale that Waugh composed at a very tender age to an epistolary lark in the voice of "a young lady of leisure"; from a hilarious fantasy about newlyweds to a darkly comic tale of scandal in a remote (and imaginary) African outpost.
The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh 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.

Evelyn Waugh's most celebrated novel is a memory drama about the intense entanglement of the narrator, Charles Ryder, with a great Anglo-Catholic family. Written during World War II, the novel mourns the passing of the aristocratic world Waugh knew in his youth and vividly recalls the sensuous plea-sures denied him by wartime austerities; in so doing it also provides a profound study of the conflict between the demands of religion and the desires of the flesh. At once romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, "Brideshead Revisited" transcends Waugh's familiar satiric exploration of his cast of lords and ladies, Catholics and eccentrics, artists and misfits, revealing him to be an elegiac, lyrical novelist of the utmost feeling and lucidity. The edition reprinted here contains Waugh's revisions, made in 1959, and his preface to the revised edition.

'We are Progress and the New Age. Nothing can stand in our way.' When Oxford-educated Emperor Seth succeeds to the throne of th e African state of Azania, he has a tough job on his hands. His subjects are ill-informed and unruly, and corruption, double-dealing and bloodshed are rife. However, with the aid if Minister of Modernization Basil Seal, Seth plans to introduce his people to the civilized ways of the west - but will it be as simple as that?

Vile Bodies is a 1930 novel by Evelyn Waugh satirising the Bright Young People: decadent young London society between World War I and World War II.
The title comes from the Epistle to the Philippians 3:21. The book was originally to be called "Bright Young Things" (which went on to be the title of Stephen Fry's 2003 film); Waugh changed it because he decided the phrase had become too clichéd. The title that Waugh eventually settled on comes from a comment that the novel's narrator makes in reference to the characters' party-driven lifestyle: 'All that succession and repetition of massed humanity... Those vile bodies...'

The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, "Brideshead Revisited" looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them.

In SCOOP, surreptitiously dubbed a "newspaper adventure," Evelyn Waugh flays Fleet Street and the social pastimes of its war co rrespondents. He tells how William Boot became the star of British super-journalism and how, leaving the part of his shirt in the claws of the lovely Katchen, he returned from Ishmaeilia to London as the Daily Beast's most accoladed overseas reporter. "With this book England's wittiest novelist sets a new standard for comic extravaganza...the real message about SCOOP is that it is thoroughly enjoyable, uproariously funny and that everyone should read it at once." (The New York Times) "...a good deal of sharp wit--you can cut your hands on it if you're not careful." (The New Yorker)

Decline and Fall (1928) was Evelyn Waugh's immensely successful first novel, and it displays not only all of its author's customary satiric genius and flair for unearthing the ridiculous in human nature, but also a youthful willingness to train those weapons on any and every thing in his path. In this fractured picaresque comedy of the hapless Paul Pennyfeather stumbling from one disaster to another, Waugh manages the delicious task of skewering every aspect of the society in which he lived.

Full name: Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

"First American edition, revised and with a new introduction." - Dust jacket.