“This beautifully produced selection of the stories from Pushkin Press (in a new translation by Nicolas Pasternak Slater) is an ideal way to discover Chekhov.” —The Times (UK)

“Mysterious and mesmerizing, these stories stay enshrined in the memory.” —The Daily Mail

“Near-perfect fiction, newly translated.” —Evening Standard

“The uncontestable father of the modern short story . . . his stories are some of the best that have ever been written.” —The Guardian

“The language is subtle and lovely, full of a regretful tenderness.” —Sunday Express

“Chekhov's genius lies in the way he manages to convey with such apparent effortlessness a profound sense of the mystery of beauty, and of the sadness of those who observe and think . . . a masterpiece of minimalism” —Phillip Pullman

“The greatest short story writer who has ever lived” —Raymond Carver

“In Chekhov literature seems to break its wand like Prospero, renouncing the magic of artifice, ceremony and idealization, and facing us, for the first time, with a reflection of ourselves in our unadorned ordinariness as well as our unfathomable strangeness.” —James Ladsun

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was born in Taganrog, Russia, the son of a grocer. While training as a physician he supported his family with his freelance writing, composing hundreds of short comic pieces under a pen name for local magazines. He went on to write major works of drama, including The Seagull, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard, but continued to write prize-winning short stories up until his death from tuberculosis at the age of 44.

Nicolas Pasternak Slater, a bilingual nephew of Boris Pasternak, is a retired haemotologist. Published translations include Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, Tolstoy's short stories, and, for Pushkin Press, stories by Ivan Turgenev and Anton Chekhov.