This collection is a wonderful introduction to Chekhov stories because it starts with his shorter, more humorous ones, and ends with his best known serious longer tales. It gives a range of his writing from 1880 -1903. I especially liked "Surgery" and "Joy."
Contents:The Little Apples, St. Peter's Day, Green Scythe, Joy, The Ninny, The Highest Heights, Death of a Government Clerk, At the Post Office, Surgery, In the Cemetery, Where There's a Will, There's a Way, A Report, The Threat, The Huntsman, The Malefactor, A Dead Body, Sergeant Prishibeyev, A Blunder, Heartache, Anyuta, The Proposal, Vanka, Who is to Blame?, Typhus, Sleepyhead, The Princess, Gusev, The Peasant Women, After the Theater, A Fragment, In Exile, Big Volodya and Little Volodya, The Student, Anna Round the Neck, The House with the Mezzanine, In the Horsecart, On Love, The Lady with the Pet Dog, The Bishop, The Bride ( )

Checkhov is, of course, a master storyteller, and the worlds he creates are fascinating and complex. The bleakness of the landscape in all of them, though, is crushing. One comes away with the impression of a late nineteenth-century Russia that is dark, cold, drunk, dirty, emotionally starved and straitened, rigidly socially classified, and on the verge of something, anything - and of course, it was - like a teenager waiting for her life to start. Despite this, Checkhov is very, very, drily funny, mocking his characters even as he paints them a sympathetic creatures. The work itself is brilliant, but the reading is not altogether enjoyable. Not for reading when you yourself are feeling bleak, however black your sense of humor might be.

Checkhov's women, also, tend to irritate, and feel much less real, much less three-dimensional, than his men. They are often flighty, un-self-aware, ridiculous, capricious, clinging, dependent, and melodramatic, which becomes tiresome. Payne's introduction to the Vintage Classics translation is enlightening, but it's so loaded with devotional praise of Checkhov that I was surprised to discover these caricatures inhabiting the same space as his legitimately brilliant characters. It doesn't make the stories not worth reading, but it does take away from the enjoyment one might otherwise experience. ( )