Mainstream fiction, from all-time classics to contemporary novels
May 8th, 2014, 3:44 pm
Cosmopolitans by W. Somerset Maugham
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Overview: The name of the collection comes, of course, from the famous magazine Cosmopolitan in which all these short stories save one appeared between 1923 and 1929. Indeed, they were written on a commission from that magazine whose editor, Ray Long, happened to read Maugham's travel book On A Chinese Screen (1922) and thinking that some of the 58 short sketches included in it might well serve as short stories commissioned a dozen or so new ones to Maugham. Later most of these very short stories were revised a great deal, acquired new titles and were published in a single volume by Doubleday in 1936.

To this book Maugham wrote one of his most charming prefaces, extremely amusing to read and containing a lot of serious thoughts about the art of fiction. He states that the stories for Cosmopolitan were to be short enough to be printed on two opposite pages of the magazine and leave enough space for an illustration. Maugham describes his difficulties to compress all he had to say in so limited a space and points out that these stories, naturally, are anecdotes. But I couldn't say it better than he did:

My difficulty was to compress what I had to tell into a number of words which must not be exceeded and yet leave the reader with the impression that I had told all there was to tell. It was this that made the enterprise amusing. It was also salutary. I could not afford to waste a word. I had to be succinct. I was surprised to find how many adverbs and adjectives I could leave out without any harm to the matter or the manner. One often writes needless words because they give the phrase a better ring. It was very good practice to try to get balance into a sentence without using a word that was not necessary to the sense.

The matter of course had to be chosen with discretion; it would have been futile to take a theme that demanded elaborate development; and I have a natural predilection for completeness, so that even in the little space at my disposal I wanted my story to have a beginning, a middle and an end. I do not for my own part much care for the shapeless story.

Genre: General Fiction/Classics

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May 8th, 2014, 3:44 pm