Read The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Tolstoy's epic of Russia in the Napoleonic age (1869).

A married woman, a cavalry officer and a train; "all happy families are alike".

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

A universe of hexagonal galleries holding every possible 410-page book, nearly all of them gibberish.

A city whose happiness depends on one child kept in a cellar, and the few citizens who leave rather than accept the terms.

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

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

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