Collected Short Fiction (62 page)

Peonies, China! So many empires had come here. Not far from where we were was the colossus on whose shin the Emperor Hadrian had caused to be carved verses in praise of himself, to commemorate his visit. On the other bank, not far from the Winter Palace, was a stone with a rougher Roman inscription marking the southern limit of the Empire, defining an area of retreat. Now another, more remote empire was announcing itself. A medal, a postcard; and all that was asked in return was anger and a sense of injustice.

Perhaps that had been the only pure time, at the beginning, when the ancient artist, knowing no other land, had learned to look at his own and had seen it as complete. But it was hard, travelling
back to Cairo, looking with my stranger’s eye at the fields and the people who worked in them, the dusty towns, the agitated peasant crowds at railway stations, it was hard to believe that there had been such innocence. Perhaps that vision of the land, in which the Nile was only water, a blue-green chevron, had always been a fabrication, a cause for yearning, something for the tomb.

The air-conditioning in the coach didn’t work well; but that might have been because the two Negro attendants, still with the habits of the village, preferred to sit before the open doors to chat. Sand and dust blew in all day; it was hot until the sun set and everything went black against the red sky. In the dimly lit waiting-room of Cairo station there were more sprawled soldiers from Sinai, peasants in bulky woollen uniforms going back on leave to their villages. Seventeen months later these men, or men like them, were to know total defeat in the desert; and news photographs taken from helicopters flying down low were to show them lost, trying to walk back home, casting long shadows on the sand.

August 1969–October 1970

CHINUA ACHEBE

The African Trilogy

Things Fall Apart

ISABEL ALLENDE

The House of the Spirits

ISAAC ASIMOV

Foundation

Foundation and Empire

Second Foundation

(in 1 vol.)

MARGARET ATWOOD

The Handmaid’s Tale

GIORGIO BASSANI

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

The Second Sex

SAMUEL BECKETT

Molloy, Malone Dies,

The Unnamable

(US only)

SAUL BELLOW

The Adventures of Augie March

JORGE LUIS BORGES

Ficciones

RAY BRADBURY

The Stories of Ray Bradbury

MIKHAIL BULGAKOV

The Master and Margarita

JAMES M. CAIN

The Postman Always Rings Twice

Double Indemnity

Mildred Pierce

Selected Stories

(1 vol. US only)

ITALO CALVINO

If on a winter’s night a traveler

ALBERT CAMUS

The Outsider (UK)

The Stranger (US)

The Plague, The Fall,

Exile and the Kingdom,

and Selected Essays

(in i vol.)

WILLA CATHER

Death Comes for the Archbishop

(US only)

My Antonia

RAYMOND CHANDLER

The novels (2 vols)

Collected Stories

G. K. CHESTERTON

The Everyman Chesterton

KATE CHOPIN

The Awakening

JOSEPH CONRAD

Heart of Darkness

Lord Jim

Nostromo

The Secret Agent

Typhoon and Other Stories

Under Western Eyes

Victory

ROALD DAHL

Collected Stories

JOAN DIDION

We Tell Ourselves Stories in

Order to Live (US only)

UMBERTO ECO

The Name of the Rose

WILLIAM FAULKNER

The Sound and the Fury

(UK only)

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

The Great Gatsby

This Side of Paradise

(UK only)

PENELOPE FITZGERALD

The Bookshop

The Gate of Angels

The Blue Flower

(in i vol.)

Offshore

Human Voices

The Beginning of Spring

(in 1 vol.)

FORD MADOX FORD

The Good Soldier

Parade’s End

RICHARD FORD

The Bascombe Novels

E. M. FORSTER

Howards End

A Passage to India

ANNE FRANK

The Diary of a Young Girl

(US only)

GEORGE MACDONALD FRASER

Flashman

Flash for Freedom!

Flashman in the Great Game

KAHLIL GIBRAN

The Collected Works

GÜNTER GRASS

The Tin Drum

GRAHAM GREENE

Brighton Rock

The Human Factor

DASHIELL HAMMETT

The Maltese Falcon

The Thin Man

Red Harvest

(in 1 vol.)

The Dain Curse

The Glass Key

and Selected Stories

(in 1 vol.)

JAROSLAV HAŠ EK

The Good Soldier Švejk

JOSEPH HELLER

Catch-22

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

A Farewell to Arms

The Collected Stories

(UK only)

MICHAEL HERR

Dispatches (US only)

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

The Talented Mr. Ripley

Ripley Under Ground

Ripley’s Game

(in 1 vol.)

JAMES JOYCE

Dubliners

A Portrait of the Artist as

a Young Man

Ulysses

FRANZ KAFKA

Collected Stories

The Castle

The Trial

MAXINE HONG KINGSTON

The Woman Warrior and

China Men

(US only)

RUDYARD KIPLING

Collected Stories

Kim

GIUSEPPE TOMASI DI

LAMPEDUSA

The Leopard

D. H. LAWRENCE

Collected Stories

The Rainbow

Sons and Lovers

Women in Love

DORIS LESSING

Stories

PRIMO LEVI

If This is a Man and The Truce

(UK only)

The Periodic Table

NAGUIB MAHFOUZ

The Cairo Trilogy

Three Novels of Ancient Egypt

THOMAS MANN

Buddenbrooks

Collected Stories (UK only)

Death in Venice and Other Stories

(US only)

Doctor Faustus

Joseph and His Brothers

The Magic Mountain

KATHERINE MANSFIELD

The Garden Party and Other

Stories

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

The General in His Labyrinth

Love in the Time of Cholera

One Hundred Years of Solitude

W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

Collected Stories

CORMAC McCARTHY

The Border Trilogy

YUKIO MISHIMA

The Temple of the

Golden Pavilion

TONI MORRISON

Beloved

Song of Solomon

ALICE MUNRO

Carried Away: A Selection

of Stories

VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Lolita

Pale Fire

Pnin

Speak, Memory

V. S. NAIPAUL

Collected Short Fiction (US only)

A House for Mr Biswas

R. K. NARAYAN

Swami and Friends

The Bachelor of Arts

The Dark Room

The English Teacher

(in 1 vol.)

Mr Sampath — The Printer of

Malgudi

The Financial Expert

Waiting for the Mahatma

(in 1 vol.)

IRENE NEMIROVSKY

David Golder

The Ball

Snow in Autumn

The Couril of Affair

(in 1 vol.)

FLANN O’BRIEN

The Complete Novels

FRANK O’CONNOR

The Best of Frank O’Connor

GEORGE ORWELL

Animal Farm

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Essays

Burmese Days, Keep the Aspidistra

Flying, Coming Up for Air

(in 1 vol.)

ORHAN PAMUK

My Name is Red

BORIS PASTERNAK

Doctor Zhivago

SYLVIA PLATH

The Bell Jar (US only)

MARCEL PROUST

In Search of Lost Time

(4 vols, UK only)

JOSEPH ROTH

The Radetsky March

SALMAN RUSHDIE

Midnight’s Children

PAUL SCOTT

The Raj Quartet (2 vols)

ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

One Day in the Life of

Ivan Denisovich

MURIEL SPARK

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

The Girls of Slender Means

The Driver’s Seat

The Only Problem

(in 1 vol.)

CHRISTINA STEAD

The Man Who Loved Children

JOHN STEINBECK

The Grapes of Wrath

ITALO SVEVO

Zeno’s Conscience

JUNICHIRO TANIZAKI

The Makioka Sisters

JOHN UPDIKE

The Complete Henry Bech

Rabbit Angstrom

EVELYN WAUGH

The Complete Short Stories

Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved

One, The Ordeal of Gilbert

Pinfold (in 1 vol.)

Brideshead Revisited

Decline and Fall (US)

Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies,

Put Out More Flags (UK)

A Handful of Dust

The Sword of Honour Trilogy

Waugh Abroad: Collected Travel

Writing

H. G. WELLS

The Time Machine,

The Invisible Man,

The War of the Worlds

(in 1 vol. US only)

EDITH WHARTON

The Age of Innocence

The Custom of the Country

Ethan Frome, Summer,

Bunner Sisters

(in 1 vol.)

The House of Mirth

The Reef

OSCAR WILDE

Plays, Prose Writings and Poems

P. G. WODEHOUSE

The Best of Wodehouse

VIRGINIA WOOLF

To the Lighthouse

Mrs Dalloway

RICHARD YATES

Revolutionary Road

The Easter Parade

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness

(in 1 vol.)

W. B. YEATS

The Poems (UK only)