Read The Stories of Anton Chekhov

Two married people meet in Yalta expecting a holiday affair and find they cannot end it; the story modern short fiction is measured against.

A St Petersburg copying clerk saves for months for a new coat and is robbed of it on the first night he wears it.

A successful judge falls ill and works out, over three months of dying, that he lived the whole thing wrong.

The twelve Strand stories, A Scandal in Bohemia to The Copper Beeches.

Ten young Florentines tell a hundred stories while the plague rages; the first modern prose.

Scheherazade keeps herself alive with Sinbad, Aladdin and Ali Baba, a story a night.

Bruno Schulz's Drohobycz turned into myth; the stories a Gestapo officer's bullet ended.

The Library of Babel, the Garden of Forking Paths and Pierre Menard; Borges in seventeen stories.