A generous anthology of fiction by the enduringly popular master Somerset Maugham, featuring in full and for the first time in one volume The Moon and the Sixpence Painted Veil, and The Magician, plus five major stories. From the caf society of Paris to the British colony of Hong Kong to the lush tropical island of Tahiti, you can travel half the world in this first-time-ever collection of three of the novels that indelibly established the popular literary reputation of W. Somerset Maugham in England and America. With him, too, you can explore that perilous territory of the human heart when the ambitions of driven men collide disastrously with the demands of passionate women. In the instant bestseller The Moon and the Sixpence, the novel Maugham famously based on the life of Paul Gauguin, love and art prove to be as incompatible as Europe and Tahiti, when the painter Charles Strickland (played brilliantly in the screen version by George Sanders) sacrifices the love of his wife, the goodwill of his friends, and the life of his mistress on the altar of his own genius. No less exotic than Tahiti is the cholera-ridden Hong Kong in The Painted Veil, which takes the adulterous Kitty Fane on a personal descent into hell in a steamy tale of passion hailed by Bookman as "one of the great short novels of our time." And in The Magician, a satanist takes dark and sinister revenge on the young woman who spurns him. Included in this volume, too, are five timeless short stories-including "The Letter," which was made into a movie starring a memorably murderous Bette Davis, and "Rain," the sultry tale of sexuality and hypocrisy that became a star vehicle for Joan Crawford.