Amusing short stories but not quite as good as Beasts and Superbeasts. Saki has a very British sense of humor -- if you don't like Wodehouse, Jerome or other authors of that ilk, you will probably not find these funny... ( )

[From Great Modern Reading, ed. W. Somerset Maugham, Doubleday, 1943, p. 463:]

I have placed next to [Ring Lardner’s “The Golden Honeymoon”] a little story by Saki. He was a Scot, a soldier by profession, and his name was H. H. Munro. He was a humorist too, as sardonic as Lardner; but he wrote not of boxers, baseball players, barbers and salesmen like Lardner; he wrote of the idle rich who amused themselves in Mayfair and in country houses in the pleasant vanished England before the first World War, in which he was killed. Efforts have been made to introduce him to the favor of the American public, but they have failed. I think he is very funny, and if you don’t, I can’t help it. Anyhow “The Match-Maker” is short.

Not going to lie - I have absolutely no memory of why I wanted to read this. It's not bad though! There are some genuinely darkly funny stories in here, although unfortunately I don't think all of them have aged that well (at least I had a hard time following some of them as someone who's not a student of the British upper class). Somewhere between a 3 and a 4, but I'll mark it 4. ( )

Solid collection of short stories from a master of the genre. Saki/Munro was able to put across his stories with a lot of punch, and with great brevity, in this case being the soul of wit. Many of the stories in this collection feature his running character Clovis Sangrail, and his reactions and/or interventions in various crises of upper-crust society. This collection has the famous "Filboid Studge," but it also has a wicked story, "Tobermory," about a cat that apparently learns to speak (and gossip); "The Hounds of Fate," in which a person who steps into the shoes of a mysterious man gets more than he bargained for; "Ministers of Grace," in which governmental figures (some of which are clearly recognizable) are changed into animals; and others. Well worth picking up. ( )

Amusing short stories but not quite as good as Beasts and Superbeasts. Saki has a very British sense of humor -- if you don't like Wodehouse, Jerome or other authors of that ilk, you will probably not find these funny... ( )