Short Fiction

We rely on your support to help us keep producing beautiful, free, and unrestricted editions of literature for the digital age. Will you support our efforts with a donation ? Saki's name is regularly mentioned alongside O. Henry and others as being in the pantheon of short story writers. Like O. Henry, Saki's stories were written in the first several years of the twentieth century, but Saki is known more for his sharp and sometimes scathing wit ("New Wine in Old Bottles") rather than for surprise endings, although he was capable of that as well ("Open Window"). A journalist as well as a writer of fiction, Saki lampooned the high society of his day in his series of "Reginald" and "Clovis" stories. He could also be quite macabre, with many of his stories demonstrating the peril of wild animals ("The Interlopers") and, surprisingly, children ("Gabriel-Ernest"). He managed to mock the retail industry in his story accompanying a Selfridges advertisement ("The Romance of Business"), although it doesn't seem that Selfridges caught the humor. Although best known by his pseudonym, Saki also regularly used his real name of H. H. Munro in his contributions to the newspapers that first published almost all of his stories.