The Serapis Classics edition of "The Anton Chekov Omnibus" contains over 150 stories penned by the Russian master! A few months before he died, Chekhov told the writer Ivan Bunin that he thought people might go on reading his writings for seven years. "Why seven?" asked Bunin. "Well, seven and a half," Chekhov replied. "That's not bad. I've got six years to live."
This book contains 350 short stories from 50 classic, prize-winning and noteworthy authors. Wisely chosen by the literary critic August Nemo for the book series 7 Best Short Stories, this omnibus contains the stories of the following writers: - H.P. Lovecraft, - Edgar Allan Poe, - Arthur Conan Doyle, - Katherine Mansfield, - Jack London, - Guy de Maupassant, - Virginia Woolf, F. - Scott Fitzgerald, - Edith Wharton, - Stephen Crane, - Susan Glaspell, - Kate Chopin, - Laura E. Richards, - Alice Dunbar-Nelson, - Louisa May Alcott, - Hans Christian Andersen, - Charles Dickens, - Nathaniel Hawthorne, - Henry James, - Mark Twain, - Charlotte Perkins, - Elizabeth Gaskell, - Herman Melville, - James Joyce, - Leo Tolstoy, - Nikolai Gogol, - Anton Chekhov, - Fyodor Dostoevsky, - Maxim Gorky, - Leonid Andreyev, - Ivan Turgenev, - Joseph Conrad, - Aleksander Pushkin, - Robert Louis Stevenson, - Robert E. Howard, - G. K. Chesterton, - Edgar Wallace, - Arthur Machen, - Ambrose Bierce, - Talbot Mundy, - Abraham Merritt, - Zane Grey, - Edgar Rice Burroughs, - Oscar Wilde, - Rudyard Kipling, - E.T.A. Hoffman, - Bram Stoker, - H.G. Wells, - Franz Kafta - Washington Irving.
Considered by many as the greatest short story writer the world has seen, Anton Chekhov changed the genre itself with his spare, impressionistic depictions of Russian life and the human condition. From characteristically brief, evocative early pieces such as The Huntsman and his masterpiece A Bet to his best-known stories such as The Lady with the Little Toy Dog and The Requiem, this collection of Chekhov’s remarkable short fiction possesses the unmatched power of art to awe and change the reader. This endlessly pleasing edition, expertly translated, is especially faithful to the meaning of Chekhov’s prose and the unique rhythms of his writing, giving readers an authentic sense of his style and a true understanding of his greatness.
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Aanton Chekhov, widely hailed as the supreme master of the short story, also wrote five works long enough to be called short novels–here brought together in one volume for the first time, in a masterly new translation by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The Steppe–the most lyrical of the five–is an account of a nine-year-old boy’s frightening journey by wagon train across the steppe of southern Russia. The Duel sets two decadent figures–a fanatical rationalist and a man of literary sensibility–on a collision course that ends in a series of surprising reversals. In The Story of an Unknown Man, a political radical spying on an important official by serving as valet to his son gradually discovers that his own terminal illness has changed his long-held priorities in startling ways. Three Years recounts a complex series of ironies in the personal life of a rich but passive Moscow merchant. In My Life, a man renounces wealth and social position for a life of manual labor. The resulting conflict between the moral simplicity of his ideals and the complex realities of human nature culminates in a brief apocalyptic vision that is unique in Chekhov’s work.