What is now called an office was previously called an office. But the morals of the bureaucratic organism are the same: intrigue, struggle for a place in the sun, etc. But since the modern office still has a gang in its genesis, this struggle is sharper and tougher. In the story by Alexander Kabakov “Vengeance is mine,” a certain N plots and works out to the smallest detail the murder of a former friend and boss, whose favor he has lost, a certain X, and at the last moment conveys his intention to the Almighty. “Stories from the series “The Bayandur Family”” by Roza Khusnutdinova are dedicated to the memory of the famous translators and human rights activist Anahit Bayandur and talk about the life of the Armenian intelligentsia in the post-Soviet years. The story of Sandra Levine, who lives in America, “Applewood, New Jersey. Weekday” is built like a detective story, but the reader waits in vain for the crime - it will not take place, although the logic of the plot leads precisely to it. “Carte Blanche”. The poet Alexander Eremenko introduces the young prose writer Svetlana Egorova with a cycle of short stories “The Thirteenth Story”: “I realized that I was reading some kind of prose that I strangely liked and which I’ve been missing lately.”