It's hard to die at twenty without having known love… An intriguing confession of doctor's romantic involvement with a beautiful 20 year old patient. Followed by Turgenev's exquisite, often meditative descriptions of Russian countryside and mysterious herbalist Kassyan infatuated with Gamayane, a prophetic bird of Russian folklore, a symbol of wisdom and knowledge. The book includes 14 stories from The Hunting Sketches collection.

As Ivan Ilyich lies dying he begins to re-evaluate his life, searching for meaning that will make sense of his sufferings. In "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" and the other works in this volume, Tolstoy conjures characters who, tested to the limit, reveal glorious and unexpected reserves of courage, or baseness of a near inhuman kind. Two vivid parables and "The Forged Coupon", a tale of criminality, explore class relations after the emancipation of the...

The English-language debut of Anton Chekhov's first collection of mystery and suspense tales. Considered one of the greatest dramatists of all time, Anton Chekhov actually began his literary career as a crime and mystery writer. Scattered throughout periodicals and literary journals from 1880-1890, Peter Sekirin brings together these psychological suspense stories in a premier collection that provides a fresh look into Chekhov's literary heritage...

The stakes are wildly high in Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's fantastic and blackly comic philosophical fables, which abound in nested narratives and wild paradoxes. This new collection of eleven mind-bending and spellbinding tales includes some of Krzhizhanovsky's most dazzling conceits: a provincial journalist who moves to Moscow finds his existence consumed by the autobiography of his room's previous occupant; the fingers of a celebrated pianist's right...

Contents include biographical notes about the author and the illustrator.