Anton Chekhov wrote that "narrative is my legal wife and drama a flamboyant, rowdy, impudent, exhausting mistress." At a time when the Russian stage was dominated by farces, formulaic melodramas, and vaudevilles, Chekhov created plays that focused on characters grappling with moral questions. His works baffled his audiences, but his sensitive explorations of love, loss, and time as well as his portrayal of complex characters and ambiguities, revolutionized...

From the New York Times bestselling Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves - and our world today. For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us,...

Called the greatest of short story writers, Chekhov changed the genre itself with his spare, impressionistic depictions of Russian life and the human condition.

In the early twentieth century, an aging actress and her lover visit the estate of her elderly brother.

Set in 1890s North Wales over a long, hot August weekend, the Victorian calm of a household is suddenly upset with the arrival of a London couple who impose their city ways and thoughts on the more rurally based family. An adaptation of Anton Chekhov's play, 'Uncle Vanya'.

Today translated crime fiction is in vogue-- but this was not always the case. A century before Scandi noir, writers across Europe and beyond were publishing detective stories of high quality. Often these did not appear in English and they have been known only by a small number of experts. This is the first ever collection of classic crime in translation from the golden age of the genre in the 20th century. Many of these stories are exceptionally...