Why read The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories?

Book cover of The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories

Book description

A vibrant translation of Tolstoy’s most important short fiction by the award-winning translators of War and Peace.

Here are eleven masterful stories from the mature author, some autobiographical, others moral parables, and all told with the evocative power that was Tolstoy’s alone. They include “The Prisoner of the Caucasus,” inspired…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Peter Blauner

Author

My first job in journalism was as an assistant to the great New York newspaperman Pete Hamill. He told me to always read people who were better than you and to back up his point he had a shelf of Russian literature in his bathroom. For years, I was too intimidated to read Tolstoy. When I finally did, I was shocked to discover that much of his writing is as accessible as the New York Post. War and Peace is his most famous work, but for me he’s most alive and urgent in his shorter fiction. The title story…

From Peter's list on making history feel like it just happened.