The Best After-Dinner Stories

This anthology collects short spoken anecdotes and table tales of the kind offered after a formal dinner: brief comic reverses, name-dropping encounters, courtroom and club-land slips, and stories that turn on a single remark. Contributors range from earlier English writers to twentieth-century politicians, novelists, and performers. The pieces are independent; there is no frame narrative and no continuous cast. Subjects include travel, vanity, drink, and the embarrassment of the well-known. The book is a sampler of oral anecdote put on the page, not a handbook of toastmaster technique and not a single author's memoir.

93 integrated. Bound white cloth printed on covers in red with drawings by the Paul Cox. Maroon slipcase and endpapers.