Author: Roald Dahl
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 1991
Language: English
Pages: 762
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0140158073
Description
This long-awaited omnibus contains all the stories from Roald Dahl's world-famous books - Over to You, Someone Like You, Kiss Kiss and Switch Bitch - plus eight further tales of the unexpected.
These stories pack their punch. The comeuppance at the end is often relishingly moral - as in The Bookseller, best of the newly collected stories, where a bookshop scam involving the extortion of cash from rich widows through fake invoices for risquT books comes to a lovely sharp end. But this repeated serving right of villains never quite softens the hard-boiled, even cynical, strain in Dahl's vision of humanity, and it is that ruthless unsentimentalism that is Dahl's greatest attraction.
PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR:
The absolute master of the twist-in-the-tale. - Observer
Dahl is too good a storyteller to become predictable, so you never know whether the tyrant or the tyrannized will win in the end. - Daily Telegraph
Roald Dahl is one of the few writers I know whose work can accurately be described as addictive. Through his tales runs a vein of macabre malevolence, the more effective because it springs from slight, almost inconsequential everyday things. The result is black humor of the most sophisticated kind. - Irish Times
Contents
KISS, KISS
The Landlady
William and Mary
The Way up to Heaven
Parson's Pleasure
Mrs Bixby and the Colonel's Coat
Royal Jelly
Georgy Porgy
Genesis and Catastrophe
Edward the Conqueror
Pig
The Champion of the World
OVER TO YOU
Death of an Old Old Man
An African Story
A Piece of Cake
Madame Rosette
Katina
Yesterday was Beautiful
They Shall Not Grow Old
Beware of the Dog
Only This
Someone Like You
SWITCH BITCH
The Visitor
The Great Switcheroo
The Last Act
Bitch
SOMEONE LIKE YOU
Taste
Lamb to the Slaughter
Man from the South
The Soldier
My Lady Love, My dove
Dip in the Pool
Galloping Foxley
Skin
Poison
The Wish
Neck
The Sound Machine
Nune Dimittis
The Great Automatic Grammatizator
Claud's Dog
The Ratcatcher
Rummins
Mr Hoddy
Mr Feasey
EIGHT FURTHER TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED
The Umbrella Man
Mr Botibol
Vengeance is Mine Inc.
The Butler
Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life
The Bookseller
The Hitchhiker
The Surgeon