Michael Arlen is remembered primarily as a novelist, the author of the extraordinarily successful novel The Green Hat (1924); however, he wrote many short stories in the 1920s and 1930s--more than forty between 1920 and 1925. His style was distinctive: by 1924 critic David Martin could declare that the term Arlenesque was a part of the literary vocabulary.

Arlen was born Dikran Kouyoumdjian on 16 November 1895, in Rostock, Bulgaria, the youngest son of Sarkis Kouyoumdjian. The family had left Armenia, and Turkish repression there, three years before. In 1901 they immigrated to England, where Kouyoumdjian attended Malvern College, then briefly studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1913 before dropping out and going to London. He was on the fringes of the literary-artistic set and was meeting people like D. H. Lawrence, George Moore, and Katherine Mansfield. He became an editor and writer for the Anglo-Armenian magazine Ararat and a contributor to A. R...