This is the first time that all Trollope's shorter fiction has been made available in one volume. It is a collection of minor masterpieces, literary entertainments and curiosities, many of which have been unavailable since their initial magazine publication. Anthony Trollope (1815-82) worked in the post office as a civil servant as well as writing his immensely popular fiction. He lived both in England and in Ireland, and travelled widely. He wrote short stories from 1860 to the end of his life, publishing 42 in all, and all of them remain eminently readable today. The themes are extraordinarily varied. They include travel, with stories based in America, India, Italy, France and Egypt among others; literary life, written while Trollope was editor of St Paul's Magazine; courtship and love (Trollope claimed to have written up to 37 fictional proposals by his fortieth birthday) and Gothic tales of the psychologically disturbed, where his genius for characterisation is displayed to the full. Nathaniel Hawthorne,described Trollope's work as 'Written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business and not suspecting they were being made show of.' The reader can expect all this and more from this superb collection.