Pain’s first book, from 1891, begins with a lazy canoe on the Backs at Cambridge, loaded with borrowed cushions and two pipes, and a meditation on art and sardines. Pieces first written for The Granta follow, among them a fantasia of a celestial grocery and the Nine Muses minus one, alongside graver stories of a boy and of a coward’s guilt.
A charming mix of undergraduate humour and quiet melancholy from one of the best comic writers of his generation. Download the free EPUB.