Collected Stories
Anton Chekhov · 1880
Chekhov invented the modern short story as we understand it: no plot, no resolution, no moralizing. Just a slice of life that somehow illuminates everything. Every subsequent short story writer works in his shadow.
The case against
Hundreds of stories, and the early ones are hack work, comic squibs dashed off for kopecks; a collected edition makes you eat the chaff with the wheat. Even the mature work has one weather: provincial torpor, failed conversations, endings that simply stop. Nothing happening is the method, granted. Stretched across the whole shelf, nothing happening is also what happens.
Short Stories · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
