A Horse and Two Goats: Stories by R.K. Narayan [FIRST EDITION • FIRST PRINTING] 1970 • The Viking Press

A Horse and Two Goats: Stories by R.K. Narayan 

FIRST EDITION • FIRST PRINTING [1970] THE VIKING PRESS

Vintage hardcover with dust jacket in stunning condition. 

Custom refurbished ex-library copy.  Dust jacket is like new; now housed in a new archival quality jacket protector.   

Book itself looks and reads like new.  Immaculate striped boards.  All library materials have been removed and front endpaper is fixed to boards for a clean presentation.  Gorgeous!

In his first collection of short stories to be published in America, the enchantment that R. K. Narayan exercised in his novels of Mal- gudi, his fictional town in South India, is again apparent. In A Horse and Two Goats, how- ever, the treatment is on the scale of a vignette or episode, perfectly timed for its effect.

The title story is not about Malgudi. It concerns instead a village peasant and his meeting with a "red man" from America; their failure to understand each other about a statue and a pair of goats is both hilarious and touching. "Uncle," the most ambitious of the Malgudi stories here, and almost a novel in miniature, unfolds the mystery that haunts a growing boy about the benevolent but somewhat sinister relative with whom he lives. In another story an eccentric gardener attaches himself and his family problems-including a pregnant black sheep and a sewing machine-to a reluctant employer. "A Breath of Lucifer," with an autobiographical preface, makes a humble hospital attendant into a figure worthy of a place in Indian demonology. Finally, in a story of a husband's tender devotion to his sick wife, Narayan touches lightly on some of the ironies of hapless mortality.

Three of these stories (two in shorter versions) have appeared in The New Yorker, one in Playboy, and one in Encounter. This collec- tion adds substantially to Narayan's status as the most important Indian writing fiction in English, and to the available good feeling in the world.  Jacket artwork by R. K. Laxman.