Somerset Maugham: 130 books

«Deve essere un mio difetto, ma i peccati altrui non mi scandalizzano – sempre che non mi riguardino personalmente». La leggendaria sprezzatura di Maugham pervade tutti i racconti di questa raccolta, popolata di personaggi tanto più veri in quanto tratti dalla sua vita multiforme di medico, scrittore,...

Quando si parla di gemme letterarie, di macchine narrative i cui meccanismi funzionano come gli ingranaggi di un orologio, di storie che riescono a ospitare, in poche decine di pagine, il respiro della letteratura, si allude a qualcosa che è realmente esistito – a quell’altissimo artigianato...

Un medico drogato, radiato dall’Albo, a suo agio «solo nella futilità»: questo il protagonista di “Acque morte”, l’ambiguo personaggio cui Maugham affida il compito di guidare, fingendo di assistervi impassibile, una vicenda di amore, di fuga e di morte che lascia spossati come una febbre tropicale.

The Moon and Sixpence is a fictional novel heavily influenced by the life of French painter Paul Gauguin. The novel is told first-person, dipping episodically into the mind of the artist. Charles Strickland is an English stock broker, who leaves everything behind him in his middle age to live in defiant squalor in Paris as an artist. His genius is eventually recognized by a Dutch painter.

Set in England and Hong Kong in the 1920s, The Painted Veil is the story of the beautiful but love-starved Kitty Fane. When her husband discovers her adulterous affair, he forces her to accompany him to the heart of a cholera epidemic. Stripped of the British society of her youth and the small but...

Bertha Lay is a woman of independent means. On her 21st birthday she inherits her deceased father's money and pursues a courtship with 27 year old Edward Craddock, who despite being tall, strong, and handsome, is below her station in life. Bertha justifies her matrimonial choice believing that the dying...

Filled with adventure, passion, and intrigue, The Narrow Corner is a classic tale of the sea by one of the twentieth-century's finest writers. Island hoping across the South Pacific, the esteemed Dr. Saunders is offered passage by Captain Nichols and his companion Fred Blake, two men who appear unsavory,...

The Explorer- Written but not published in 1899, first produced as a play in 1908 Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Pacific is inconstant and uncertain like the soul of man. Sometimes it is grey like the English Channel off Beachy Head, with a heavy swell, and sometimes it is rough, capped with white crests, and boisterous. It is not so often that it is calm and blue. Then, indeed, the blue is arrogant. The sun...

After one has left a country it is interesting to collect together the emotions it has given in an effort to define its particular character. And with Andalusia the attempt is especially fascinating, for it is a land of contrasts in which work upon one another, diversely, a hundred influences.

All her life Miss Elizabeth Dwarris had been a sore trial to her relations. A woman of means, she ruled tyrannously over a large number of impecunious cousins, using her bank-balance like the scorpions of Rehoboam to chastise them, and, like many another pious creature, for their soul’s good making...

THE Pacific is inconstant and uncertain like the soul of man. Sometimes it is grey like the English Channel off Beachy Head, with a heavy swell, and sometimes it is rough, capped with white crests, and boisterous. It is not so often that it is calm and blue. Then, indeed, the blue is arrogant. The...

For Christmas, Charley Mason's father granted him a trip to Paris, all expenses paid. It should have been a lark, but on his first night Charley meets a woman whose story will forever change his life. For Lydia has seen tragedy. The Russian Revolution displaced her family, left her homeless,...

This play was produced at the Royalty Theatre, on March 27th, 1919, with the following cast: Sir Arthur Little C. Aubrey Smith. Ronald Parry George Relph. Henry Pritchard V. Sutton Vane. George Appleby Townsend Whitling. Osman Pasha George C. Desplas. Violet Fay Compton. Mrs. Etheridge Eva Moore. Mrs. Pritchard Helen Haye. Mrs. Appleby Mrs. Robert Brough.