Chekhov: Stories for Our Time

About the Author:

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860 - 1904) was a Russian playwright and short story writer who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. The son of a grocer, he was born into a large family in Taganrog, Russia. As he studied in medical school, he supported the family by writing hundreds of stories under a pen name for local magazines. In his twenties, he shifted his focus to drama, writing plays that would signal the birth of modernism in theater: The Seagull, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard. Alongside his work as a doctor, he continued to write extraordinary short stories—nearly one thousand in all—until his death from tuberculosis at the age of 44.

About the Introducer:

Boris Fishman was born in the former Soviet Union and immigrated to the United States in 1988 at nine. He is the author of A Replacement Life and Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo (HarperCollins), both New York Times Notable Books of the Year. He has won the Sophie Brody Medal from the American Library Association and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. His journalism, essays, and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and Book Review, The Guardian, Travel & Leisure, New York Magazine, and many other publications. His next book is a work of creative nonfiction, a family history told through recipes. He lives in New York City and teaches creative writing at Princeton University.

About the Translators:

Constance Garnett was an English translator who rendered the great works of Russian literature in English during the first half of the 20th century. She was not only the first to translate Dostoyevsky and Chekhov into English, but also the complete works of Turgenev and Gogol and the major works of Tolstoy.

Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in the Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, publisher of Restless Books, and host of NPR’s “In Contrast.”

Alexander Gurvets was born in New York City and attended Amherst College, where he studied Russian and Mathematics.

About the Illustrator:

Matt McCann works at the photo desk The New York Times, where he's been working in one form or another since 2011.

Ilan Stavans was born in Mexico City and is the Publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, and A Critic’s Journey. He has edited The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, the three-volume set Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, among dozens of other volumes. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Chile’s Presidential Medal, the International Latino Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award. Stavans’s work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted to the stage and screen. A cofounder of the Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, Chicago, Oxford, and Dublin, he is the host of the NPR podcast "In Contrast."