The first English-language collection of a contemporary Russian get better at of the short story, who has been profiled in the brand new Yorker

Maxim Osipov, who have lives and practices medicine inside a city ninety miles outdoors Moscow, is one of Russia’s best modern writers. In the tradition of Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams, he pulls on his encounters in medicine to write tales of great subtlety and dazzling insight. Osipov’s fiction presents a nuanced, collage-like portrait of lifestyle in provincial Russia-its tragedies, frustrations, and moments of humble beauty and motivation. The twelve stories in this volume depict doctors, actors, screenwriters, teachers, business owners, local politics bosses, and common scammers whose paths intersect in unstable yet entirely organic ways: in sickrooms, classrooms, administrative offices, and on trains and in planes. Their encounters result in disasters, main and small epiphanies, and-on occasion-the guarantee of redemption.