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Indian Express

A new story by Graham Greene, an invitation to reassess a familiar author

The wind keens outside the window, the rain a whiplash on the shutters. Inside a rented apartment on the French Riviera, a solitary traveller reads to pass the interminable hours of the storm. The posthumous discovery of Graham Greene's ghost story 'Reading at Night', possibly written in 1962 and only just published in Strand Magazine, a Michigan-based quarterly, offers more than just a literary footnote. It reveals the elasticity of a writer best known for his Catholic guilt-laced thrillers and political novels. Discovered in the archives of the University of Texas at Austin, the story's haunted atmosphere, the tension between memory and perception, its spectral uncertainty, reveal a writer attuned to the darkness that lingers just beyond the reach of reason. One of the finest writers of the 20th century, Greene is not alone in genre detours. The same edition of the magazine also carries a short story by Ian Fleming about a faded journalist grappling with the summons from a media baron, a departure from his flamboyant James Bond series. From Henry James's eerie Turn of the Screw (1898) to the genre-bending fiction of Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro, writers have often strayed from familiar ground to pursue artistic reinvention. These forays reflect not inconsistency, but range — and a willingness to engage with a broader emotional spectrum of storytelling. There is also something magnetic about 'lost' stories. When forgotten works surface, they invite readers to reassess familiar authors through unfamiliar lenses. They serve as time capsules, preserving the anxieties, experiments, or ambitions that didn't fit neatly into a writer's canon. For a new generation, these offer a chance to encounter literary titans not through weighty reputations but through more intimate pieces. 'Reading at Night' may be a ghost story, but its real power lies in re-animating Greene, reminding readers that even great storytellers can live outside their legacies, experimenting on the margins.