When God Laughs, and Other Stories

Twelve stories, and hardly a comfortable one among them: a boy who has worked in a mill since childhood and simply walks away from it, a Chinese coolie in Tahiti guillotined for another man's crime because the names sound alike, two burglars who poison each other over the takings, a ship's crew driven to cannibalism, a captain fighting to get round the Horn, and, in A Piece of Steak, an ageing boxer who loses his fight for want of one good meal. London collected them in 1911, and the anger in them is exact rather than loud. Sixty plates after Frederic Remington and William Bradford, from Arctic whaling and Havana to clipper ships, give these stories of the ring, the sea and the mill their weather.