Charles Ryder's Schooldays and Other Stories

A collection of short fiction by "the only first-rate comic genius that has appeared in England since Bernard Shaw" (according to Edmund Wilson), Charles Ryder's Schooldays returns to print eleven short stories by Evelyn Waugh, together with a recently discovered sketch about the early life and family background of Charles Ryder, the nostalgic hero of Brideshead Revisited. Likely intended as the first chapter of a novel tracing the emotional roots of the Brideshead narrator, the title story is a sensitive, convincing portrait of a young man emerging from schoolboy conformity to a tentative criticism of the "subhuman, wholly respectable" world around him. The other stories--brilliant entertainments in the manner of Waugh's early comic novels--include "By Special Request" (written as an alternative ending to A Handful of Dust) and "Incident in Azania," a return to the scene of Black Mischief. A worthy and welcome addition to Waugh's published works, these stories display all the outrageous wit and satiric intelligence for which Time awarded him "a roomy cell in the murderer's row (Swift, Pope, Wilde, and Shaw) of English letters."