In the kitchen, he poured another drink and looked at the bedroom suite in his front yard. The mattress was stripped and the candy-striped sheets lay beside two pillows on the chiffonier. Except for that, things looked much the way they had in the bedroom—nightstand…

He was a good husband, a good father. I don’t understand it. I don’t believe in it. I don’t believe that it happened. I saw it happen but it isn’t true. It can’t be. He was always gentle. If you’d have seen him playing with the children, anybody who saw him…

Once, there was a red-haired man who had neither eyes nor ears. He had no hair either so he was called "red-haired" only theoretically. He could not speak since he had no mouth. He didn't have a nose either. He had neither legs nor arms. He had no stomach…

BUSINESS IS SO BAD at the moment that sometimes, if I’m just killing time in the office, I take the sample case and go see the clients myself. I’d also been meaning to go and pay a visit to N. for a while, because we used to work together all the time and…

The visitor rang once, twice – it was quiet on the other side of the door, no reply. He pressed the button again, ringing for a long time, insistently, demandingly – heavy running footsteps were heard – and a short wench, sturdy as a fish, all smelling of…

It was a dark autumn night. The old banker was walking up and down his study and remembering how, fifteen years before, he had given a party one autumn evening. There had been many clever men there, and there had been interesting conversations. Among other…

The following story, the simple and domestic incidents of which may be deemed scarcely worth relating, after such a lapse of time, awakened some degree of interest, a hundred years ago, in a principal seaport of the Bay Province. The rainy twilight of an…

If ever you spoke to my father about witch-doctors (Oom Schalk Lourens said) he would always relate one story. And at the end of it he would explain that, while a witch-doctor could foretell the future for you from the bones, at the same time he could only…

HE bent down and rubbed his ankle where it had been sprained with the walking so that he couldn’t see the ankle bone. Then he straightened up and looked around him. He felt in his pocket for a packet of cigarettes, took one out and lit it. He wiped the sweat…

The novelist Yuri Slyozkin sat in a posh armchair. Everything in the room was posh, so Yuri looked excruciatingly out of place there. His head shaven by typhus was just like that boy's head described by Mark Twain (a pepper-sprinkled egg). A moth-eaten army…

 My husband’s favorite food, in childhood, was corned beef. I found this out yesterday when friends came over and we started talking about food. At some point they asked what our favorite childhood foods had been. I couldn’t think of any, but my husband didn’t…

One day Orlov stuffed himself with so much mashed beans that he died. And Krylov, on finding out about Orlov, died too. And Spridinov died also, but for no reason whatsoever. And Spiridonov's wife fell off a kitchen cabinet and died as well. And Spridonov's…

“In the shape of a pig?” cried the Mandarin. “In the shape of a pig,” said the messenger, and departed. “Oh, what an evil day in an evil year,” cried the Mandarin. “The town of Kwan-Si, beyond the hill, was very small in my childhood. Now it has grown so…

THE twilight of evening. Big flakes of wet snow are whirling lazily about the street lamps, which have just been lighted, and lying in a thin soft layer on roofs, horses’ backs, shoulders, caps. Iona Potapov, the sledge-driver, is all white like a ghost.…

Carlson stood on the hill in the silent center of the city whose people had died. He stared up at the Building-the one structure that dwarfed every hotel-grid, skyscraper-needle, or apartment-cheesebox packed into all the miles that lay around him. Tall as…

 The night swims. Pitch black. Can't sleep. The icon-lamp flickers anxiously. Shots in the distance. My brain's on fire.  Everything's misty.  Mamma! Mamma! What we gonna do?  Slyozkin's building something. Piling something up. Fine Arts. Photo. Lit. Dram.…

At evening times above the restaurants The sultry air’s harsh and stale. The spirit of the spring-time pestilence Reigns over drunken muffled wails. And further up in dusty alley ways, Beyond the summer cottage sloth, A baker’s shop sign glistens gaudily…

B EFORE THE LAW there’s a gatekeeper. A man from the country comes up to this gatekeeper and asks to be admitted to the law. But the gatekeeper says that he can’t let him in right now. The man thinks it over and then asks whether he’ll be allowed to go in…

The dark of a warm August night, and the dim stars can barely be seen twinkling here and there in the cloudy sky. A soft road into the fields, rendered mute by deep dust, down which a chaise is driving with two youthful passengers: a young miss from a small…

And the just man trailed God's shining agent, over a black mountain, in his giant track, while a restless voice kept harrying his woman: "It's not too late, you can still look back   at the red towers of your native Sodom, the square where once you sang,…