Short Stories

About the book

A housekeeper's proposal to take in a lodger begins An Honest Thief, opening a modest domestic space to another person's history. The collection then changes scale and tone through correspondence, social humiliation, jealousy, recollection, satire, and visionary experience. Its contents include The Peasant Marey, The Crocodile, Bobok, and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, alongside five further pieces. These are distinct stories, not chapters of one continuous plot. Their proximity lets readers compare how Dostoyevsky alters a narrative voice to bring an uncomfortable situation into focus. A small incident can reveal a dependence that a character would rather conceal; an extraordinary premise can make familiar habits of judgment look strange. Begin with one story and follow what its telling asks you to believe.

• Social embarrassment
• Compassion
• Unreliable self-knowledge

Why read it

For varied, compact encounters with a writer whose comic and unsettling registers often occupy the same scene.

Nine-story collection · English text