Bondage is my best work. It is the kind of book that an author can only write once. After all, he has only one life. But the book I like best is Cakes and Ale. It was an amusing book to write." The Moon and Sixpence is the story of a man rejecting a conventional lifestyle, family obligations and social responsibility to indulge his ambition to be a painter. The structure of the book is unusual in that the protagonist is already dead before the novel opens, and the narrator attempts to piece together his story, and particularly his final years in Tahitian exile. The Razor's Edge, the author's last major novel, is described by Sutherland as "Maugham's twentieth-century manifesto for human fulfilment", satirising Western materialism and drawing on Eastern spiritualism as a way to find meaning in existence. Short stories For many readers and critics, the best of Maugham is in his short stories. Raphael writes that Maugham became widely regarded as the supreme English exponent of the form – "both the magazine squib and the more elaborate conte". Most were first published in weekly or monthly magazines and later collected in book form. The first volume, Orientations, came out in 1898 and his last, Creatures of Circumstance, in 1947, with seven others between the two. Maugham's British and American publishers issued and reissued various, sometimes overlapping, permutations during his lifetime and subsequently. The stories range from the short sketches of On a Chinese Screen, which he had written during his 1920 travels through China and Hong Kong, to many, mostly serious, short stories dealing with the lives of British and other colonial expatriates in the Pacific Islands and Asia. These often convey the emotional toll that isolation exacts from the characters. Among the best-known examples are "Rain" (1921), charting the moral disintegration of a missionary attempting to convert the sexual sinner Sadie Thompson; "The Letter" (1924), dealing with domestic murder and its implications; "The Book Bag" (1932), a story of the tragic result of an incestuous relationship; and "Flotsam and Jetsam" (1947), set in a rubber plantation in Borneo, where a dreadful shared secret binds a husband and wife to a mutually abhorrent relationship. Among the short stories set in England, one of the best-known is "The Alien Corn" (1931), where a young man rediscovers his Jewish heritage and rejects his family's efforts to distance themselves from Judaism.