joe2d2's review against another edition
5.0
a master class in short form narrative. anthony heald's audio performance breathes amazing life into each little tale.
unionmack's review against another edition
4.0
Chekhov's been on my list for years and I'm so glad I finally got around to reading him. While these stories all have engaging plots—some among the most engaging I've encountered in short fiction—it seems Chekhov's two greatest talents are for sketching characters and playing with irony. Each of these narratives is full of people you feel you get to know as well in a few pages as you would in a whole lifetime. He's so great at distilling the most essential and paradoxical parts of the human condition into hyper-focused examples and scenarios. Sometimes, this comes through tragically, but more often than not, it's funny as hell. I hadn't really heard from anyone that Chekhov was this humorous, but I found myself laughing out loud a ton. Some of these stories are outright masterpieces, and all of them are terrific..
unionmack's review against another edition
4.0
If literature is primarily meant to show us what it means to be human, there are few people more competent in that regard than Anton Chekhov. Quite a few of these stories read almost like 19th century episodes of Curb, and plenty of the others, though less comic, still hold up as both mirrors into our own souls precisely because they're such good windows into others'. While I think the previous volume was a little more solid throughout—there were a few stories in here that really just didn't hold my attention—I really enjoyed making my way through the final batch of his short fiction.
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