Author: Rudyard Kipling
Eminent Contributors/
Translator(s)/ Editors(s): Ruskin Bond
Publisher: Rupa
Year: 2011
Language: English
Pages: 172
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8129110709
Description
Over the ages, story-telling has been a challenge and passion for writers across the world. Keeping a reader's attention and interest alive is no easy task. But the toughest of all, is to tell a story that is both engaging and gratifying few words.
Ruskin Bond presents this anthology of 'super short' stories that qualify the doubly difficult criteria of being entertaining as well as crisp. In an amalgamation of sorts, here are tales that combine thrill with social comment, humour with horror, temperament with the supernatural, and wit with tragedy.
A wide variety of simple stories, each with its own distinct aura of sentiment, terror, the bizarre, or the unexpected, meant to keep you excited till the last word.
The Rupa Book of Snappy Surprises includes crazy sequences of events, halarious and insidious 'perfect' crimes, and stunning revelations. There is music that kills; a stuffed bird that flies; a rabbi who is tortured by hope; a debtor who remembers to pay even after death; and a man who dupes none other but himself! Symbolically potent, and wilfully shocking, this is a collection of addictive stories from masters like Ambrose Bierce, Saki, Lord Halifax, Rudyard Kipling, and Ruskin Bond.
Ruskin Bond, one of India's best-loved and most prolific writers, has been writing novels, poetry, essays and short stories for almost half a century now.
Apart from this, over the years he has expertly compiled and edited a number of anthologies. For his outstanding literary conttibution he was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957, the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1992 (for English writing in India) and the Padma Shri in 1999.
Contents
Introduction
MASTER OF THE MACABRE
The Boarded Window
One Summer Night
Staley Fleming's Hallucination
The Stranger Four stories by Ambrose Beirce
THE PERFECT CRIME
Death in the Kitchen
H2 etc.
Coroner's Inquest
A Worm's Turning
The Two Horns
'Yoked with an Unbeliever'
Dusk
The Amorous Ghost
The Man Who Came Back
GHOSTS AND GHOULS
The Vampire
Night of the Millennium
'I Will Pay You All To-morrow'
The Bordeaus Diligence
The Doctor's Ghost
CLASSIC SHORTS
The Eyes Have It
The Vampire
The Four-Fingered Hand
The Third Performance
Torture by Hope
The Statement of Randolph Carter
The Interlopers
The Shifting Growth
The Story of Muhammad Din
His First Flight