The Man Who Would be King and Other Stories

"Small wonders"
--"Time Out London"
"I wanted them all, even those I'd already read."
--Ron Rosenbaum, "The New York Observer"

Sean Barrett's reading goes beyond narration into performance in The Man Who Would Be King, a novella in Conradian vein. He begins gently enough as the Indian civil servant who recounts his first meeting with Peachey Carnehan and Daniel Dravot, 'gentlemen at large', who are planning to carve out a kingdom for themselves in a remote corner of Afghanistan. Barrett then creates the colourful personalities of the conniving Peachey and the bombastic, red-bearded Daniel before they disappear up country. Four years later Peachey reappears, a 'rag-wrapped, whining cripple', and tells the story of their meteoric rise and even faster fall. Kipling's storytelling and Barrett's reading is so immediate that you feel he's actually in the fanatically idolatrous mountain kingdom, living the perils of the protagonists. Other macabre stories in the collection include The Phantom Rickshaw, The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes and The Mark of the Beast. --- Christina Hardyment, The Times

"I wanted them all, even those I'd already read."
Ron Rosenbaum, "The New York Observer"
"Small wonders."
"Time Out London"
"""[F]irst-rate astutely selected and attractively packaged indisputably great works."
Adam Begley, "The New York Observer"
"I ve always been haunted by Bartleby, the proto-slacker. But it s the handsomely minimalist cover of the Melville House edition that gets me here, one of many in the small publisher s fine 'Art of the Novella' series."
"The New Yorker"
"The Art of the Novella series is sort of an anti-Kindle. What these singular, distinctive titles celebrate is book-ness. They're slim enough to be portable but showy enough to be conspicuously consumed tiny little objects that demand to be loved for the commodities they are."
KQED (NPR San Francisco)
"Some like it short, and if you're one of them, Melville House, an independent publisher based in Brooklyn, has a line of books for you... elegant-looking paperback editions ...a good read in a small package."
" ---The Wall Street Journal

In a remote part of 19th-century Afghanistan, two British adventurers pursue their ambition to rule an empire. Using betrayal, threats and guns they win the respect of a primitive tribe and become worshiped as Gods, until one day they draw blood and the game is up. The Man Who Would Be King is an action-packed tale about the pitfalls of colonialism and the temptations and evils of power. This volume also includes the stories The Phantom Rickshaw, The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes, The Mark of the Beast and many more.