Read The Overcoat

Chichikov tours provincial Russia buying dead serfs on paper; Gogol's comic epic.

The Lady with the Dog, Ward No. 6 and the rest; the short story as we know it.

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

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 man reads the Confucian histories and finds the words "eat people" written between every line; the first story in modern vernacular Chinese.

A 999-line poem and the mad commentary of the man who stole it; Nabokov's puzzle novel.

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.