Old Arkhip sits every day by the roots of a wizened hunchbacked willow fishing and exchanging
whispered stories with the ancient tree. One of these takes Arkhip three decades back in time
to a quiet day in early spring when a strange encounter shook him momentarily from the rural
bliss in which he lived catapulting him into a world of crime corruption violence and
murder. A quintessential example of Chekhov's artistry ?The Willow' is here accompanied by
thirty-two other short stories - some of them never or rarely translated into English - which
are representative of the three main phases of the author's career: the short light-hearted
pieces of the late 1880s the darker more pessimistic tales of his maturity and the
psychologically nuanced stories he wrote towards the end of his life. Taken together this
collection is further proof of Chekhov's unparalleled skills as a practitioner of the
short-story genre.
