Like the celebrated "Klondike Tales," the stories that comprise "South Sea Tales" derive their intensity from the author's own far-flung adventures, conveying an impassioned, unsparing vision borne only of experience. The powerful tales gathered here vividly evoke the turn-of-the-century colonial Pacific and its capricious tropical landscape, while also trenchantly observing the delicate interplay between imperialism and the exotic. And as Tony Horwitz asserts in his Introduction, "When London's stories click, we are utterly there, at the edge of the world and the limit of human endurance."
Industry Reviews
"He was an adventurer and a man of action as few writers have ever been . . . the excellence of his short stories has been almost forgotten."--George Orwell