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Short Stories by Saki
- Narrated by: Frederick Davidson, Nadia May
- Length: 11 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged Audiobook
- Categories: Literature & Fiction, Anthologies & Short Stories
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Summary
More from the same
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What listeners say about Short Stories by Saki
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance1 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- RAC
- 21-09-19
Fantastic stories appalingly read.
Appaling reading.
The accents are soooo artificially upperclass they pass through normal comprehension of aristocratic accents into the incomprehensable realm of actor affectation.
Awesone stories wrecked
2 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Dr. R. Brompton
- 15-12-15
Simply brilliant.
The short stories by Saki are simply wonderful. Some are sadly poignant, some mystical and macabre, most of funny. The character of Clovis deserves to be more widely known as he is a triumph of literature! Darker than Wodehouse, funnier than Wilde, sharper than Coward. Listen to one at a time or gorge on a lot in an afternoon, you are bound to enjoy it.
2 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Dan Bowen
- 12-11-13
Saki Saki long time ...
Any additional comments?
Wonderfully English in the traditional aristocratic sense. There are a lot of stories here and my only criticism would be that despite the wit and invention of them, there is little variation in the style and arc. It's a minor problem though.
1 person found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
- Jackson
- 20-11-12
Lady Bracknell meets the Hound of the Baskervilles
Imagine a drawing room in an Oscar Wilde play, with the atmosphere crackling with epigrams. And underneath that there is an untamed world of nature, amoral and cruel but liberated. That is the effect of Saki’s typical short stories. Anyone who enjoys The Importance of Being Ernest will enjoy the wit of Saki, although there is a quite distinctive character to his writing. Every word counts.
The stories are read alternately by a male and female reader. Their accents are highly mannered, which is completely appropriate for the material and its Edwardian upper class background (viewed highly ironically) but some may find this irritating. The author’s attitudes to trade unions and suffragettes are frankly reactionary, but this is apparent in only a few of the least typical stories.
They are very short and about six stories are included in each chapter of the audiobook.
1 person found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Penelope
- 06-11-21
Wonderful
Thank you so much for this delightful reading of Saki. A joy and a delight
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Nicholas P.
- 03-11-21
exquisitely amusing tales
This complete collection of Saki's short stories is read delightfully, expressing all the humour, sometimes macabre, and uses the English language to its full extent to enrich the telling.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- BadMedisin
- 23-09-20
Darkly hilarious (mostly)
These stories are great. If you’ve read any of Roald Dahl’s tales of the unexpected, this is where he got the idea from. They’re somewhat dark, ironic, twisted, and mostly very funny, although it might not be everybody’s kind of humour.
Yes, the narration is annoying, but it’s entirely the way it should be. The characters are posh edwardians, deal with it.
Clovis is such a great character, he’s like a trickster god for posh people. And Sredni Vashtar is one of my all time favourites - polecat god ftw!
The one big problem for me is the chapters, there’s about 5 or 6 stories in each chapter so it’s difficult to find the end of a story if you’re not enjoying it, but that’s no big deal. I’d advise listening to this in small doses to avoid going mad, but overall this is pretty good.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Adeliese Baumann
- 18-11-12
Satirical brilliance
Saki is a favorite of mine, and I often turn to these familiar tales as I would to an old photograph album of times gone by.
There are a few dark, haunting tales such as "The Image of the Lost Soul" and "The Music on the Hill," but most of the stories here are light and funny. We are introduced to social-climbing hostesses, party-crashers, kleptomaniac relatives, aristocrats with amnesia, precocious children, reticent men in trying situations, scheming shopkeepers, and hapless travelers. All sparkle with originality and humor, and May and Davidson bring each one to life.
The author's prejudices against suffragettes, labor unions, and so forth, are evident. If this offends some, recall that these things are also a part of what makes Saki so very much a man of his time and social station. In short, there is no such thing as Edwardian "political correctness," however much we'd like to believe it was all "Downton Abbey."
Saki's death at the age of 45 while fighting in World War I cut short a brilliant writing career. I often wonder what he would have had to say about the dissolution of the society he knew so well...
The only thing I would change is that this collection is missing "The Interlopers," an eerie classic. Still, this is an extensive collection. I highly recommend it to all Saki fans as most other readings are quite short by comparison, and many are not performed half as well as those you'll hear here.
14 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Johnny Tezca
- 26-08-15
Everything was great except for it's totallystupid
Saki is a singular writer, not in style but in substance. His style is still with us, with fiction writers like Hammett, Vonnegut and Palahniuk.
In substance, he and Wodehouse share a lot in a very good way. They could be cousins, but one of them drinks a lot of absinthe.
The stupid part is that's it's a book of short stories, without a table of contents or
story titles in the app display.
Please tell me if it's there and I didn't see it. All 5 stars if had been or becomes formatted better.
9 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
- Chris
- 10-05-07
Devilishly witty
A gross (more or less) of short stories ranging from very short to extremely short. Very few duds and almost all with a dry, slyly cynical, rapier-witted twist in the final sentence. Perfect for car listening and often laugh-out-loud funny. I often rewound to listen to the same story twice just to savor Saki's way with the Queen's English.
7 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
- pashopper
- 02-03-09
Wonderful collection for Saki fans
I would have given this 5 stars but for the fact that the memory of an old record from the public library I listened to as a child is hard to live up to. The narrators here are very good though. If you are not familiar with Saki writings - then this is an excellent collection for those who love the subtle wit and dry British humor that was his style (in order to appreciate it fully). Also included in this book are a few stories that were not meant to be comedic. He was a master of what he did and I enjoyed this audio very much.
5 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
- Glen Phipps
- 29-11-03
A Poor Recording of a Brilliant Work
If you like insane humor delivered quietly and politely, then you'll love Saki. His twisted view of everyday life is as funny today as when it was written. Davidson and May give an excellent reading of these wonderful stories, it is unfortunate that they sound as if they were recorded on a Mr. Microphone in the trunk of a 1957 Buick on I-95 during rush hour. If you go for this, and you should, definitely get the best quality format your player can handle.
10 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
- Edie Snow
- 12-08-10
Giggling on the subway
This is a great collection. Saki is always wonderful, and and these two readers perform perfectly. I would strongly consider audios by either of them. And if you are snickering to yourself on the train in a bad neighborhood, people will leave you alone.
3 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
- Jenny
- 28-12-05
My kind of humor
Humor is a very personal thing. I remember once giving a collection of 'The Onion' articles to someone who later returned it to me with a puzzled expression. "That wasn't funny at all," she said. So, that said, if you don't think subversive, ironic, slightly sarcastic, Monty-Pythonesque, prim-people-stuck-in-very-unpleasant-situations, prim-people-who-don't-even-realize-they're-prigs, subtle, comedy of manners kind of situations funny, then you probably may not like Saki. Otherwise, this man is a genius.
5 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Gregala
- 22-11-21
Wit and wonder from the master of the ending twist
Saki never fails to delight. His wit is dry, but his cup of imagination runneth over. Though usually lighter than Oscar Wilde in tone, he has a dark side (wolves and even werewolves) that can astonish. Clovis is the uninhibited friend you cherish, and the remorseless enemy of hidebound aristos. And no children are as cunningly, cruelly true to life as those in The Story Tel!er or The Lumber Room.
1 person found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- BlindEddieWithNF
- 16-07-21
and he wonderful author
a great storyteller. any creative and fantastic new author I discovered through suggestion from a friend
1 person found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- J. C. Dunn
- 25-04-21
A treat
I’m familiar with Saki’s best-known stories “ Sredni Vashtar,” “The Music on the Hill” and “The Open Window,” but this collection was a huge treat and Nadia May and Frederick Davidson do a corking good job of rendering the voices of all the upper class twits, flâneurs, battleaxes and “angel” children that populate these stories.
1 person found this helpful
