The short stories of Kingsley Amis — the great master of post-war comic prose — are dark, playful, moving, surprising and extremely funny. This definitive collection gathers all Amis' short fiction in a single volume for the first time and encompasses five decades of storytelling. In The 2003 Claret, written in 1958, a time machine is invented for the weighty task of sending a man to 2010 to discover what the booze will taste like. In Boris and the Colonel a Cambridge spy is unearthed in the sleepy English countryside with the help of a plucky horse, while in Mason's Life two men meet inside their respective dreams. The collection spans many genres, offering ingenious alternative histories, mystery and horror, satirical reflections and a devilishly funny attacks. Amis' stories reveal the scope of his imagination and the warmth beneath his acerbic humour, and they all share the unmistakable style and wit of one of Britain's best loved writers.

I suppose it was conceited of me. But it was fun. And I felt like getting a bit of my own back on some of the people who'd conned and flattered me into wasting all those years. This is one of 50 original and exciting books of short stories, publishing in February to celebrate half a century of Penguin Modern Classics.

«Penguin Decades» bring you the novels that helped shape modern Britain. When they were published, some were bestsellers, some were considered scandalous, and others were simply misunderstood. All represent their time and helped define their generation, while today each is considered a landmark work of storytelling. Kingsley Amis' «Lucky Jim» was published in 1954, and is a hilarious satire of British university life. Jim Dixon is bored by his job as a medieval history lecturer. His days are only improved by pulling faces behind the backs of his superiors as he tries desperately to survive provincial bourgeois society, an unbearable 'girlfriend' and petty humiliation at the hands of Professor Welch. «Lucky Jim» is one of the most famous and influential of all British post-War novels.»