Maugham's style is perfectly suited for short story writing. His facility of communicating all kinds of ideas is truly amazing. Thus his stories feel like a light read, but they also often give you pause--Maugham is trying to pry deep into what makes people think and act the way they do. He wrote his stories a century ago, and the mark of the time lies firmly upon some of them. It is clear that he was influenced by psychological insgihts and ideas that have penetrated intellectual circles of his time. Read these stories for their ease of communication, ideas about human nature, and vivid images, such as those of the South Pacific and the industrial landscape of the rising American giant.

As a master of the short story, W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was the highest paid author in the 1930's. He was born in the British Embassy in Paris, on January 25, 1874.

He wrote with a sense of irony and wit. Often, he would express a cynical attitude towards life and his love of traveling found its way into his writing. He didn't confine himself to one genre, but also wrote novels, essays and plays.

His purpose was to entertain his readers, although you do learn the subtleties of human nature from many of his stories. His keen eye for the minute details of life is combined with his writing style in such away as to capture and keep your attention. It is said that due to becoming an orphan at the age of 10, he was shy and tended to be more of a passive observer rather than an active participant. This explains some of the detachment that you feel in various stories.

"I have never pretended to be anything but a story teller. It has amused me to tell stories and I have told a great many. It is a misfortune for me that the telling of a story just for the sake of the story is not an activity that is in favor with the intelligentsia. In endeavor to bear my misfortunes with fortitude." (from Creatures of Circumstance, 1947)

In this collection you will find stories that are filled with tales of the South Seas, Europe and America. They are concise and persuasive and evoke a time and place where you completely are absorbed into a story that often has a nice unforeseen twist right at the end. Either you are surprised, laughing, sad life took a certain turn, or very amused.

My Favorite Stories in this Collection :

The Vessel of Wrath: A tale of love between a missionary and a drunken reprobate that has a most surprising ending. It deals with how humans draw foregone conclusions and how people can change for the better.

The Force of Circumstance: Story of almost unavoidable circumstances and deals with the emotions a woman feels when she finds out her husband has had children with a native woman in the village and seems to have neglected to inform her.

The Colonel's Lady: A wife publishes her poetry without her husband's knowledge. He can't understand her or why everyone loves her writing. The reader might not understand him, but might understand his wife's need to express her creativity in her own way as obviously, he is not aware of that part of her life.

The Round Dozen: Amusing and almost unavoidable ending.

These are stories you can read when you have an hour here or there to read a few stories at a time. Some are short enough to be read in 15 minutes or less and are only a few pages long. I enjoyed the slightly longer ones as the character development intensifies and Maugham's powers of observation have time to play out to the full extent.

An escape to another time and place.

I've only just discovered the wonders of W. Somerset Maugham. This was the first of his works that I have ever read, and it was an absolute pleasure. There are other reviewers on these pages who are more knowledgeable and better critics than I, so I am just going to tell you how much I enjoyed this particular compilation. Every story was a treasure. Every single character was so well drawn, that for the first time in a long time I found myself empathising with these people, loving them, hating them, lamenting for them and genuinely caring about what happened to them.

Every story started off in a fairly prosaic, nondescript fashion. But every story had me hooked by at least the first page. Sometimes they unfolded as funny stories, other were tales about how an individual's world had changed catastrophically. I never got bored, and the writing was never predictable, Maugham always had a surprisingly poetical observation to make that would send me into raptures. This is truly a writer of sensitivity and talent. I can honestly say that I have been searching for a writer of this calibre for a long time. If you care anything at all about the amazing stories that ordinary, little people have, then read this book and Maugham's other works. He truly is a master.

Somerset Maugham was a veteran of British intelligence during World War I, an experience that was to influence his views of the world in subsequent years as well as his writing. The Trembling of a Leaf is a compilation of six short stories and two sketches by Maugham, including his famous story "Rain," an ironic look at the dark consequences and of being too fixated on the object of your affections, -- which is perhaps better known by its film and theater adaptation as "Sadie Thompson." Romance, the cruel forces of reality, and a keen attention to the unforeseen color this classic anthology showcasing Somerset Maugham's literary genius.

It's great news that they'll soon be issuing a new edition of this collection. The stories are timeless and beautifully rendered. Maugham explores everything from the evils of colonialism to the rigid social expectations of turn of the century Chicago aristocrats -- and in each case he transports us to the South Pacific. He's one of the great practitioners of the short story and this collection provides us with a concise glimpse at his handiwork.

This book consists of 8 short stories, many of them playing in the South Sea Islands. After reading this book you will want to go there and enjoy the beauty of life. Beautifully written, a pure pleasure to read!

Referees are usually not good players, critics are usually not good writers, however when an accomplished writer sits down to rate some of the great novels and novelists since the founding of this literary form, results are an amalgam of lucid reading in biography and literary criticism. I managed to read most of the authors listed here over the last 20 years, while avoiding some based on Maugham's take on them. My most favorite is Tolstoy and War and Peace. I would never have had the courage to approach this Russian grand master of story telling but for Maugham's hand holding. It is a pity no other eminent author ever tried to rate another 5 or 10 novelists ever again, like for instance Salman Rushidie's take on Premchand, Tagore, Solzhenytsyn, DH Lawrence, Hemingway and Hans Christian Andersen. That is my wishful thinking. Hope some kind publisher at least resuscitates this out of print book of all times by Maugham for the benefit of all readers of 21st century.

Maugham was so bold to come up with what he considered the ten greatest Novels and their Novelists, that one must be curious about this much courage. In the introduction he explains his stand on "Streams of Conciousness" and therefore eliminates such books as Ulysses, Rememberance of Things Past and Mrs. Dollaway. Also he does not include Middlemarch. But his list is only Ten and although he picks David Copperfield over Bleak House(which is not a great story) or Great Expectations the book withstands the test of time. Tom Jones, Pride and Prejudice, Whithering Heights,Pere` Goriot, etc. The biography of Herman Melville is one of the greatest essays I have ever read and is worth the rest of the book alone. A well rounded intro into the great novels of the world. Madam Bovery, The Red and the Black, War and Peace, Brothers Karamozov and Vanity Fair.

This is a Great book. A classic of travel writing that provides the dual treat of describing exotic settings and a host of fascinating characters encountered along the way.

"Gentleman in the Parlour is a supurb book on Maughams travels in Southeast Asia before the second world war. Anyone who carries with them that sence of romance and adventure of when that part of the world did not have the tallest buildings and the best hotels should take this with them as a travel companion, or just enjoy it in an armchair. The highlights are his detailed discription of his trek to Angor Wat. If the reader doesnt already know that Angor Wat is one of the half dozen great man made wonders will be throughly educated. His discriptions of French Indochina (Vietnam) are particularly vivid. Especially Hue`and Haiphong. There are misfits and opiem eaters and wandering expats as well as the hotels he helped make famous. Raffle's, The Oriental and The Strand. This goes in my backpack with "The Quiet American" and "The Great Railway Bazzar." And I travelled this area in 64,73,86,and97. Also Maugham's "On a Chinese Screen" is worth it.

Maugham claimed that he was "in the very first row of the second-raters". Maybe, but maybe not.

While his style may not elevate his work to the status of "great literature," you owe it to yourself to read Maugham. This collection is a fine place to start. The Moon and Sixpence is based on the life of Paul Gaugin and The Magician is based more than loosely on Aleistar Crowley's exploits. Fascinating people who Maugham used to craft page-turning stories around.

Maugham is greatly underappreciated. This is a great collection to begin exploring his work.

The ability of this man to put insight within insight into the innermost knooks and crannies of the human condition and then palce you, the reader, almost, but not quite, clautrophobically close to the action (or often a lack of) is literally mesmerizing! He was not a man easily fooled by anyone. He then endows the reader with this insight from which I, for one, leaned a great deal.

Every one of his characters is keenly observed and fully fleshed into often tragic believability but always alive with their human-ness, warts and all.

I miss his stories more than any others when I'm finished. This collection is a global tour de force, rich in colour, intrigue and the dust that setles on the crooked paths his characters tread.

Get it, read it (several times), you won't be sorry!

What a wonderful book this is! I love W. S. Maugham. I first read his short stories in college and "Home" has never left me. Maugham's words are a great comfort to me and this biography about his life and his experiences are absolutely fascinating! Reading biographies is a hobby of mine, sometimes I do not get passed page 30 due to the horrible boring words of the biographers, but this book is an absolute delight. It is a must read for ALL Maugham lovers.

"Maugham" remains the quintessential biography of this enigmatic figure. The most complete and thorough examination of the life and tramas and adventures that made up the life of the man and the writer. As Morgan states, Maugham is the most popular writer of serious fiction that England has produced since Charles Dickens. Weather that fiction is literature or not remains to be seen by his fans and by his critics the discussion has been put aside forever. Somerset Maugham is barley mentioned in acadamia. But Maugham had a genius for story telling (Max Beerbohm) and he told more than two hundred of them in his plays, novels, essays and most admirably in his short stories. As Alexander Freere said, I you don't think he can write, read "The Outstation" or "The Alien Corn" and then sit down and write a better one. His barroom fight scene in "The Moon and Sixpense" is superior to anything by Hemmingway and it was written six years before "The Nick Adams Stories" or The Torrents of Spring" were published. Maugham's story is so fantastic that it is no wonder he was such a good friend of Churchill's. Churchill, of course had an equally eventfull life. Maugham was as famous a playwright in the teens and the twenties as Neil Simon, but he was also a Doctor an ambulance driver on the Western Front and a spy who was given the assignment to try to squelch the Bolshevik Revolution. All in a twenty year span during which he wrote ten unsuccessful novels and "Of Human Bondage". He was also the first great world traveller author with the possible exception of Conrad. Maugham went nearly everywhere one could expect to travel during the days of World Wars and steamships. He wrote about his travels in short stories that are still widely read by many of my fellow travellers along with the first guru tripping novel,"The Razor's Edge." Somerset Maugham's Villa Mauresque on the French Riveria was the place he entertained royally. He was a great instructor to his chef and an innovator of cuisine. He was at various times friends with Henry James, Virginia Woolf, H.G. Wells, Noel Coward and Graham Greene, but the reason this book influenced me more than any book I have ever read is the additional cast of characters that I was unaware of before reading Morgan's book. Writers like; Arnold Bennett, Lytton Strachey, Aubrey Beardsley, Ruppert Brook and scores of other people whose work I am now familiar with because of this biography. This book has been critized by many fans for being too rough on the writer. Labeling Maugham a women hater, cheap, anti semetic, cynical, bitter at being considered a second rater and a promiscuous Bi-sexual who became exclusively homosexual after the age of forty to almost a pornographic obsession. In other words, only being able to enjoy anonymous encounters. All this criticism is unfounded. Morgan paints a sympathetic balanced portrait of a painfully sensitive human being who lived through a time that is difficult to judge. I can count myself as Somerset Maugham's biggest fan and I love women. I have travelled to many Maugham spots on the globe: Tahiti, Capri, Trivandrum, Pagan and Haiphong. I even visited his home in South Carolina and his writers cabin. This is a Great Book.

I loved, loved, loved this book. It sat on my shelf for so many years and I never read it! Pity! I agree with the above writer that you felt sorry for the main character but I could not help but feel that it was his destiny to be so sad. His destiny was in the stars and he was in bondage. Just a great, great, read.

I love this book for its energy, its vitality, its sadness. One can really relate to Philip, the main character and can't help feeling sorry for him partly because he is so stupid. He has a club foot, and stupidly is very very very conscious of it, thinking himself a cripple. He stupidly falls in love (or rather, is infatuated by) a common waitress who scorns his love and leads him in a fool's paradise. She almost destroys his life until at last, he finds true love in the form of Sally, a decent, polite, shy girl. The book is finely written, with brilliant use of language and poetic structure. A moving, involving, engrossing novel. I loved it.

Huellas en la Jungla William Somerset Maugham

Las seis historias cortas que componen esta obra, están escritas de la forma ingeniosa con que este autor siempre nos hace interesarnos por pasajes exóticos. Este autor sufre del defecto británico de ser un escritor metódico y moroso, es decir, se toma todo el tiempo del mundo para narrar su historia, lo que, cuando la historia es buena, suele ser desesperante. Sin embargo son tan interesantes que estamos dispuestos a sacrificar sus introducciones largas y a veces tediosas, para llegar a su tremendo y a veces excitante desenlace. Todas las historias están situadas en las colonias que tenia Gran Bretaña tenia a mediados de del siglo pasado en diferentes partes y en casi todas ellas el autor actúa como una especie de oyente a quien, por su carácter de transitoriedad le es confiado un secreto que pesa en la mente de algún atormentado residente de esas tierras. En otras el autor se da cuenta de cosas que los otros no, debido, según dice él, a que los demás están embotados por el clima. Somerset muestra a veces en sus obras una especie de superioridad pedante, pero no por esto deja de mostrar una gran perspicacia y un gran manejo de los elementos lingüísticos.

Luis Méndez.

The kernel of this novel dates back to 1895 when Maugham was twenty years old and stayed in Florence to learn Italian. He came across a story in which a "husband suspecting his wife of adultery and afraid on account of her family to put her to death, took her down to his castle in the Maremma the noxious vapours of which he was confident would do the trick; but she took so long to die that he grew impatient and had her thrown out of the window." It is around this core (which is not exactly the plot line of the novel, don't worry) that Maugham developed the story of Kitty Fane, a woman who is vain, superficial and in need of appreciation. It is a story that plays in Hong Kong and China in the 1920s. Maugham knew both places from his extensive travels in the South East but, characteristically for him, he does not spill much ink on descriptions of the landscape or the natives, which is a pity. He is much more interested in his fictitious characters.

As always, Maugham is a master of drawing characters who possess all the self-importance, weakness, and suffering that underlie human existence. His characterizations are so sardonically true that he was sued two times over the book by people in Hong Kong, and had to change the name of Hong Kong into Tching-Yen, and the name of one of the characters from Lane (innocent enough, one would think) to Fane.

I was wondering why this rather obscure novel by Maugham has received nothing but glowing five-star reviews by almost exclusively female readers. The reason is that this novel is about marriage and the restraints that marriage imposes upon passion. Also, it is a classic story of a woman's spiritual awakening. Two themes that appeal to female readers to such an extent that they tolerate Maugham's biting sarcasm and his rather unromantic view of life (he is quoted as saying that "habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous"). If there is an author who is not touchy-feely, it is W. Somerset Maugham. Marriage, he soberly concludes, is a matter of convenience. Passion, on the other hand, is a matter of inconvenience: it lurks untamed behind "the painted veil which those who live call life". What is left? Faith? Maybe, I think Maugham would say, but most people are not humble enough to be truly religious ("no egoism is so insufferable as that of the Christian with regard to his soul" is another quote by the master).

"The Painted Veil" is well worth reading. However, it suffers a bit from Maugham's self-assured way of portraying people and constructing a plot. It is a well-told story, but it is not a first rate novel. I think the problem is that Maugham's characters in this book are too one-dimensional which works well in a comedy of manners, but not in a book that wants to discuss matters like love, passion, marriage, life and spiritual growth in a serious way.

I agree with the many reviewers here who enjoy this as a gripping literary read. But it is also the first of three fine novels about Hong Kong - along with Timothy Mo's The Monkey King and Paul Theroux's Kowloon Tong, this book for me contained insights into certain Hong Kong personalities I encountered during my residence there in the 90's. In the case of the Painted Veil, a novel from the 1920's (!), certain actions and attitudes of western expatriates were still visible in my day (before and after the end of British rule). A little bit of playing at being "gentlemen" by people who could not afford the pose back home. This book, like Mo's and Theroux's, caused no end of upset in certain quarters of Hong Kong when released. Though it was not banned in China, like Kowloon Tong, in Hong Kong "writs were served!" (Parts of Hong Kong can react a little bit like a small town when its described by someone who's left it for better things - the other parts read these books with pleasure.) The detached reader need not worry about any of this - it's a great read. Enjoy.

An unusual read, I was engrossed after the first page! And as avid readers, we know what a delight it is to find a book that can enchant us in the first chapter and hold our interest until the end, and even beyond. The story follows a married British couple,Walter and Kitty Fane. Walter Fane is a bacteriologist that is working for the British government while stationed in Hong Kong. Kitty, a young and bored wife, soon succumbs to her passions with another man. Charles, another British government official. This affair comes to an end when they suspect Walter has found out about their liaisons. This is where the real excitement begins, and maybe the first form of "biological punishment" witnessed in a classic novel. What does this mean? Buy the book, and I promise that you will not be disappointed!

As a woman you can identify yourself very well with Bertha, but there is a big difference between the social situations. That's exactly what makes this book so special, you see yourself even if the reactions of Bertha are often stupid and wrong you understand what she feels and why she's doing it. You see that maybe in her situation you would have reacted the same way and that makes you thinking About it. There are many little things which tell so much about people's emotions and the situations.

It's a very interesting book. It shows our feelings very well. It's simple to read. But I think it's more a book for women than for men. Mrs Craddock is an intelligent person and she has married a simple man. In the beginning she is very in love with him. And they are lucky. But later she notices that he is not Mr Right and her life gets boring. She leaves him and meets someone else in Italy.... I can recommend this book to everyone which is interested in love stories. But it's not a simple love story with a happy ending!

W. Somerset Maugham has long existed somewhat on the periphery of literary and critical respectability: "a first-rate second-rater," someone once called him. But the more I read Maugham the more I become convinced that this is a snobbish appraisal, derived perhaps from his extraordinary popular success (if it's popular, it can't be good) and, later, from revelations regarding his homosexuality along with some unpleasant personal details related by various biographers. But none of this should get in the way of a reader seeking out Maugham's best work---"Of Human Bondage," certainly, and the much-less-known "Mrs. Craddock."

"Mrs. Craddock" is a stunningly powerful novel of one woman's compromises with the realities of love. Reminiscent on the one hand of Flaubert's "Madame Bovary," and on the other of Kate Chopin's "The Awakening," this novel has a vitality and brilliance of characterization all its own. Bertha, the heroine, is superbly rendered: a woman who is unable to understand until too late the nature of her emotional folly, a victim of her own self-imposed romantic delusions. Edward, her husband, is equally compelling: a fundamentally good man who has simply, in essence, married the wrong woman. Watching these two mismatched souls attempting to co-exist is engrossing, painful, and exhilarating. The story is solidly written in the usual Maugham plain style, and is just as relevant today as it must have been the year it was published.

This "lost" Maugham novel---ignored even by many Maugham admirers---deserves a wider readership. Those interested in Maugham's fiction of this period, or in turn-of-the-century novels centered on women, owe it to themselves to try this unjustly neglected masterwork.