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.