Saki came to the short story as a satirist and never averted his eye from the darker side of human nature, a place where not only social ineptness, pomposity, and foolishness are rooted but criminality as well. Saki’s first works of fiction, collected in Reginald, are short sketches featuring a rakish but keen observer of the follies of his upper-middle-class London society. As a prototype of later narrator-protagonists, Reginald is something like a witty and caustic Socrates of the salon, whose passion to expose the foibles of his dim-witted and obnoxiously stupid contemporaries is reflected in much of Saki’s fiction. Besides his short stories, he wrote a full-length play, The Watched Pot, in collaboration with Charles Maude and a historical study, The Rise of the Russian Empire, the only book published under his own name. In The Storyteller, an aunt is travelling by train with her two nieces and a nephew. The children are inquisitive and mischievous. A bachelor is also travelling in the same compartment. The aunt starts telling a moralistic story but is unable to satisfy the children's curiosity. The bachelor butts in and tells a story in which a "good" person ends up being devoured by a wolf, to the children's delight. The bachelor is amused by the thought that in the future the children will embarrass their guardian by begging to be told "an improper story." You can listen online to free English audiobook “The Storyteller” by Saki on our website.
