Saki

Interspersed with spelling and grammar exercises is a diary of Conradin's study of this nameless force that drives him.

In his years with his father, he stumbled across Saki's famous story of Sredni Vashtar and found it beautiful.

And Sredni Vashtar became Conradin's first name for his nameless god.

In the journal, Conradin catalogs the strange impulses and certainties that guide him through life.

Welcome to today's deep dive.

We are looking at a transcript that unpacks the classic Saki short story, The Open Window.

A fantastic piece of writing.

It really is.

Specifically, we want to look at how a single well-placed narrative can completely alter a person's perception of reality.

By the end of this deep dive, I promise you, you are going to look entirely differently at the information and the stories that you are told every single day.

What's fascinating here is that Saki has essentially disguised a brilliant psychological case study as, you know, a fictional short story.

He strips away the noise of the real world and puts a microscope on the exact mechanisms of confirmation bias, cognitive anchoring, and how the human brain can be seamlessly hacked by a good storyteller.

Welcome, dear listener, to aristocratic slumber.

[classical music] My name is Sigmund Oppenbaum, and I'm very pleased to have you with me tonight as we settle into a deliciously wicked little tale by Hector Hugh Munro, better known by his pen name, Saki.

From his 1911 collection titled The Chronicles of Clovis, I shall be reading for us Tobermory.

It was a chill, rain-washed afternoon of late August day, that indefinite season when partridges are still in security or cold storage, and there is nothing to hunt unless one is bounded on the north by the Bristol Channel, in which case one may lawfully gallop after fat red stags.

The Peace Offering

The Peace Offering from The Chronicles of Clovis by Saki.

Recorded by Lucy Parry, Philippa, and Peter Earsley.

i want you to help me in getting up a dramatic entertainment of some sort said the baroness to clovis you see there's been an election petition down here and a member unseated and no end of bitterness and ill-feeling and the county is socially divided against itself i thought a play of some kind would be an excellent opportunity for bringing people together again and giving them something to think of besides tiresome political squabbles

The Quest.

From the Chronicles of Clovis.

By Saki.

Recorded by Lucy Perry.

It is called The Open Window.

And it's a short story by the British writer Starkey.

That was his pen name.

And it was first published in the early 20th century.

This is the love story of real hinge couple Odin and Edward, written and read by me, Curtis Garner.

Listen to the free audiobook now.

The Open Window by H.H. Munro, or his pen name was Saki.

I'm going to read it quite slowly, and I might put on a little bit of a posh voice.

I'd never, um, I've never thought about liking one versus the other more, but so I, one of my sons is named after a short story writer.

Hector Hugh Monroe or Saki is a British short, short story writer, never wrote a novel.

Maybe he did sort of, he wrote something called the unbearable Bassington.

It was kind of quasi a short story.

End of an excerpt from chapter four of Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography.

Filboid Studge: The Story of a Mouse That Helped, from The Chronicles of Clovis by Saki.

This is a LibriVox recording.

All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.

For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Recording by David Lewis Richardson.

Filboid Studge: The Story of a Mouse That Helped by Saki.

"I want to marry your daughter," said Moggs Bailey, with faltering eagerness.

"I am only an artist with an income of two hundred a year, and she is the daughter of an enormously wealthy man, so I suppose you will think my offer a piece of presumption." Duncan Dullamy, the great company inflator, showed no outward sign of displeasure.

End of Angela, an inverted love story by William Schwenk Gilbert, recorded by Andrew Short.

The Brogue by Saki.

This is a LibriVox recording.

All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.

For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Timothy Casey.

The Brogue by Saki.

The hunting season had come to an end, and the Mullets had not succeeded in selling the brogue.

There had been a kind of tradition in the family for the past three or four years, a sort of fatalistic hope, that the brogue would find a purchaser before the hunting was over.