Collections

For the first time: the Nobel Prize-winning author’s stunning short fiction collected in one volume, with an introduction by the author. • “Naipaul is the world’s writer, a master of language and perception.” — The New York Times Book Review Over the course of his distinguished career, V. S. Naipaul has written a remarkable array of short fiction that moves from Trinidad to London to Africa. Here are the stories from his Somerset Maugham Award–winning Miguel Street, in which he takes us into a derelict corner of Trinidad’s capital to meet, among others, Man-Man, who goes from running for public office to staging his own crucifixion. The tales in A Flag on the Island, meanwhile, roam from a Chinese bakery in Trinidad to a rooming house in London. And in the celebrated title story from the Booker Prize– winning In a Free State, an English couple traveling in an unnamed African country discover, under a veneer of civilization, a landscape of squalor and ethnic bloodletting. No writer has rendered our postcolonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face.

From the Nobel Prize-winning author comes two novels and a collection of stories that capture the rhythms of life in the Caribbean and England with impressive subtlety and humor. “The world’s writer, a master of language and perception.” — The New York Times Book Review The Suffrage of Elvira is Naipaul’s hilarious take on an electoral campaign in the back country of Trinidad, where the candidates’ tactics include blatant vote-buying and supernatural sabotage. The eponymous protagonist of Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion is an aging Englishman of ponderously regular habits whose life is thrown into upheaval by a sudden marriage and unanticipated professional advancement. And the stories in A Flag on the Island take us from a Chinese bakery in Trinidad—whose black proprietor faces bankruptcy until he takes a Chinese name—to a rooming house in London—where the genteel landlady plays a nasty Darwinian game with her budgerigars. Unfailingly stylish, filled with intelligence and feeling, here is the work of a writer who can do just about anything that can be done with language.

Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the great modern writers presented in attractive, accessible paperback editions. “The most splendid writer of English alive today. . . . He looks into the mad eye of history and does not blink.” — The Boston Globe Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, V.S. Naipaul is our most intelligent and unflinching observer of the collision between modern and traditional societies. His novels, essays, and reportage are distinguished by their wit, outrage, and compassion, and by a prophetic vision of individuals caught in the tectonic upheavals of history. Vintage Naipaul includes the prologue and first chapter of the novel A House for Mr. Biswas ; a vignette from the novel Half a Life ; “Jasmine” from The Overcrowded Barracoon ; “Synthesis and Mimicry” from India: A Wounded Civilization ; “A New King for the Congo: Mobutu and the Nihilism of Africa” from The Writer and the World ; “Jack’s Garden” from his memoir The Enigma of Arrival ; and the story “The Bomoh’s Son” from the collection Beyond Belief .