Collected Stories of Roald Dahl: Introduction by Jeremy Treglown(Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)

Table of Contents:
Introduction by Jeremy Treglown Select Bibliography Chronology An African Story Only This Katina Beware of the Dog They Shall Not Grow Old Someone Like You Death of an Old Old Man Madame Rosette A Piece of Cake Yesterday Was Beautiful Nunc Dimittis Skin Man from the South The Soldier The Sound Machine Mr Botibol Vengeance Is Mine Inc. The Wish Poison Taste Dip in the Pond The Great Automatic Grammatizator Claud’s Dog: —The Ratcatcher —Rummins —Mr Hoddy —Mr Feasey My Lady Love, My Dove Neck Lamb to Slaughter Gallopin Foxley Edward the Conqueror The Way Up to Heaven William and Mary Parson’s Pleasure Georgy Porgy Mrs Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat Royal Jelly The Champion of the World Genesis and Catastrophe Pig The Landlady The Visitor The Last Act The Great Switcheroo The Butler Bitch Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life The Hitchhiker The Umbrella Man The Bookseller The Surgeon Appendix: Dates of Composition and First Publication

About the Author :
Roald Dahl (1916–1990) was born in Llandaff, South Wales, and went to Repton School in England. His parents were Norwegian, so holidays were spent in Norway. As he explains in Boy, he turned down the idea of university in favor of a job that would take him to 'a wonderful faraway place'. In 1933 he joined the Shell Company, which sent him to Mombasa in East Africa. When World War II began in 1939 he became a fighter pilot and in 1942 was made assistant air attaché in Washington, where he started to write short stories. His first major success as a writer for children was in 1964. Thereafter his children's books brought him increasing popularity, and when he died children mourned the world over, particularly in Britain where he had lived for many years.

Review :
“With the inventive power of a Thomas Edison and the imagination of a Lewis Carroll...Roald Dahl is a wizard of comedy and the grotesque, an artist with a marvelously topsy-turvy sense of the ridiculous in life.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer “Dahl has the mastery of plot and characters possessed by great writers of the past, along with a wildness and wryness of his own. One of his trademarks is writing beautifully about the ugly, even the horrible.”—Los Angeles Times “A collection of Roald Dahl stories is always occasion for applause.”—Chicago Daily News “An ingenious imagination, a fascination with odd and ordinary detail...are the first strengths of Dahl’s storytelling.”—New York Times Book Review “[Dahl’s] stare is unblinking, and most of his tales are irritants, provocations. Fantastic as Grimm, neat as O. Henry, heartless as Saki, they stick in the mind long after subtler ones have faded: incredible (literally), unforgettable, and vengefully funny.”—from the Introduction by Jeremy Treglown