For the first time: the Nobel Prize winner&rsquo;s stunning short fiction collected in one volume, with an introduction by the author.<br><br>Over the course of his distinguished career, V. S. Naipaul has written a remarkable array of short fiction that moves from Trinidad to London to Africa. Here are the stories from his Somerset Maugham Award&ndash;winning <i>Miguel Street,</i> in which he takes us into a derelict corner of Trinidad&rsquo;s capital to meet, among others, Man-Man, who goes from running for public office to staging his own crucifixion. The tales <i>in A Flag on the Island, </i>meanwhile, roam from a Chinese bakery in Trinidad to a rooming house in London. And in the celebrated title story from the Booker Prize&ndash; winning <i>In a Free State,</i> an English couple traveling in an unnamed African country discover, under a veneer of civilization, a landscape of squalor and ethnic bloodletting.<br><br>No writer has rendered our postcolonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face.