The close readings of seven stories that make up the book deftly trace a middle ground between two very different approaches. There are only occasional references to the writers’ lives and times, and texts range from classics (Gogol’s The Nose Tolstoy’s Master and Man) to more minor works (Chekhov’s In the Cart). This is a random snapshot of the authors’ output, as well as a peculiarly masculine slice of literary history.ħ5 of the best books for 2021, from Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera to Insatiable by Daisy Buchanan This is no history of 19 th-century Russian literature the Booker Prize-winner is clear that he neither reads Russian, nor studies its literature systematically. His stories crowned a century’s flowering of Russian prose, with international acclaim showered on long realist novels, but also the shorter fiction of Gogol, Turgenev and Tolstoy.Īnyone still in need of persuasion will find it hard to resist George Saunders’ tribute to these four master craftsmen, the bedrock of his lectures at Syracuse university and inspiration for his own prolific, acclaimed short-story writing. “I don’t remember a single story over which I’ve spent more than 24 hours”, observed Anton Chekhov in 1886, “and I wrote The Huntsman in the bathing shed!” Despite this self-deprecation, few would dispute that Chekhov was one of the finest ever exponents of the short story.
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