The Best of Roald Dahl

About The Best of Roald Dahl

Includes the stories “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” and “The Ratcatcher,” soon to be short films from Wes Anderson on Netflix

A collection of the best short stories from a writer with “an ingenious imagination, a fascination with odd and ordinary detail, and a lust for its thorough exploitation” (The New York Times Book Review).

If Stephen King could write with murderous concision, he might have come up with “The Landlady,” the story of a boarding house with an oddly talented proprietress and a small but permanent clientele. If Clive Barker had a sense of humor, he might have written “Pig,” a brutally funny look at cooks and vegetarianism. And a more bloodthirsty Jorge Luis Borges might have imagined the fanatical little gambler in “Man From the South,” who does his betting with a hammer, nails, and a butcher knife.

But all these stories in this volume were written by Roald Dahl, whose genius for the horrific and grotesque is unparalleled and entirely his own.