V.S.Pritchett (1900-1997) - VSP as he was affectionately known - was the greatest British short-story writer of the twentieth century, and one of its liveliest and most humane critics. The story of his own life was extraordinary, full of comedy and pathos and eccentricities.

Here is a pithy and knowledgeable distillation of the London experience -- a panorama of its history, art, literature, and daily life. Here is the city that Londoners know, a paradox of grandeur and grime, the locus of bustling markets and tranquil parks, of the ancient and modern, of palaces and pubs, of docks and railroad depots. Great Londoners of the past stalk these pages -- Wren, Pepys, Defoe, Hogarth, Dickens, and of course, that consummate Londoner, Samuel Johnson, who said, "No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford." And here, too, are the faces of the people inhabiting 1960s London -- milkmen and master mariners, dockers and shopkeepers, messengers, Chelsea pensioners, and, inevitably, the London bobby. There is, as well, an analysis of the Londoner himself, enigmatic and enduring, with his remote but insistent respect for law, royalty, and ritual, his affection for argument, his toleration of eccentrics.

Introduction by JEREMY TREGLOWN “In his daily walks through London,” notes Jeremy Treglown in his Introduction to this collection, “Pritchett watched and listened to people as a naturalist observes wild creatures and birds. He knew that oddity is the norm, not the exception.” This finely attuned sense, coupled with an understanding that nothing in life is mundane, is what makes these stories so immensely enjoyable. Drawing on a vast treasure chest of writings, Treglown has selected sixteen of Pritchett’s gems, including “A Serious Question,” which makes its debut in book form here. Featuring some of the best work from a long career, this new compilation of Pritchett’s brilliantly compact stories illuminates his legendary skills.

"If, as they say, I am a Man of Letters, I come, like my fellows, at the tail-end of a long and once esteemed tradition in English and American writing. We have no captive audience. We do not teach. We write to be readable and to engage the interest of what Virginia Woolf called 'the common reader.'" In a life that spanned almost the entire course of the twentieth century—he was born in 1900 and died in 1997—Sir Victor Pritchett mastered nearly every form of literature: the novel, short fiction, travel writing, biography, criticism, and memoir. Now, Sir Victor's son Oliver has selected representative samples to illustrate the tremendous scope of his father's brilliance. Included in this volume are sections of Pritchett's memoirs, A Cab at the Door and Midnight Oil; his reflections on turning eighty; and an account of a visit to the Appalachians written in 1925. There are also portraits of Dublin, New York, the Amazon, and Spain; selections from the novels Dead Man Leading and Mr. Beluncle; thirteen complete short stories; excerpts from biographies of Turgenev and Chekhov; and critical pieces on Twain, Scott, Dickens, Eliot, Henry James, Tolstoy, Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie, and others. "Pritchett has lived as a man of letters must, by his pen, and he has done it with a freshness of interest and an infectious curiosity that have never waned," observed novelist Margaret Drabble. Taken together with Oliver Pritchett's appreciation of his father, and John Bayley's "In Memoriam," The Pritchett Century stands as the most comprehensive collection of Sir Victor's work available in one volume.

In spring 1927 V.S Pritchett set out to walk 300 miles across Spain. The country was almost completely isolated, and Pritchett describes a timeless country on the cusp of being riven by civil war, populated by a wonderful selection of characters.

The essayist, critic, novelist, short story writer, and biographer presents 203 essays on such writers as Gibbon, Cervantes, Balzac, Flaubert, Woolf, Shaw, Twain, Garci+a7a Lorca, Updike, Rushdie, and others. - Google Books.

It's sweltering summer in New York City, and Asa Leventhal is alone. His co-workers ignore or condescend to him, his wife is away with her mother, and his estranged brother has run off, abandoning his wife and two sons. One night, Leventhal is confronted by a stranger--'one of those guys who want you to think they can see to the bottom of your soul'--who reveals himself to be a marginal figure from his distant past. Leventhal, accused of ruining the man's life, becomes shocked and dismissive, vehemently denying any part in the man's unhappy lot. But as time passes, he is increasingly unable to separate his own good fortune from the bad luck of this down-and-out stranger, who will not leave him be. A brief, haunting rumination on the vagaries of fate and responsibility, The Victim is, in the words of Norman Rush, Saul Bellow's "purest creation."