This edition gathers together for the first time some eighty-six uncollected prose fictions by Rudyard Kipling, including four unpublished items, two of them only fragments; sixteen unreprinted items; twelve of them previously unrecorded in the bibliographies, and three items doubtfully attributed. The remaining items have all been reprinted at one time or another, some in accessible form, but even more in publications so obscure or inaccessible that they hardly provide publication: the United Services College Chronicle, for example, or The Victorian – the journal of Victoria College, St Helier, Jersey – or Reginald Harbord's Readers’ Guide to the Work of Rudyard Kipling (8 volumes, privately printed in an edition of 100 copies, 1961–72). The stories are now all made available in accessible form.

By far the greater number of items – fifty-one out of the total of eighty- six – appeared in the Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore, the paper with which Kipling was most closely associated in his Indian years. Another seventeen were published in the Pioneer, the paper that Kipling joined in late 1887. Since most of the stories have an Indian origin, a brief account of Kipling's career as a journalist in India may be useful to the reader.

Kipling was not yet 17 years old when, on leaving school, he went to Lahore, the capital of the Punjab, to join the staff of the Civil and Military Gazette. The title of the paper refers to the two official communities of British India: one was either in the Army or in the Civil Service. A journalist was not part of the system, and that fact gave the young Kipling a special freedom of movement and understanding that certainly helped his creative work. The CMG, as it may be called, was issued from a large printing establishment that held government contracts and also did extensive job printing. But the entire editorial staff of the paper consisted only of Stephen Wheeler, the editor, and of the teenage Rudyard Kipling, the assistant editor. When one of them was ill or absent, then the other did all the editorial work, often, of course, in blazing hot weather, and always with a staff of compositors and proofreaders, most of whom knew no English.