This book publishes for the first time two stories by the English writer David Garnett (1892–1981). It will be interesting and useful for the modern Russian reader to replenish his literary collection of “transformations”, adding to Apuleius’s “The Golden Ass”, Bulgakov’s “Heart of a Dog” and Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” Garnett’s “Fox Woman” and the story of a man who imprisoned himself in a cage at the London Zoo. The first of these short stories, immediately upon publication, was awarded two prestigious literary awards, and the second was filmed.

I really enjoyed... your “Fox Woman,” which I hasten to tell you about . I read as if spellbound, without stopping, although I knew in advance how it would all end. In my opinion, this is a success. Your desire to cross modern humor with eighteenth-century style looks very tempting. However, something else is even more interesting - your talent as a storyteller. Every minute something happens, and what’s amazing is without any effort, lively and at ease, and in general everything is very similar to Defoe. It's clear that you don't have a lot to worry about. This is the most difficult thing for us, the old guard of writers - the need to write stories, but with you they come out of themselves... From a letter from Virginia Woolf to David Garnett (1922)

There is no talking about how it is written will. In my opinion, it’s written great: as they say, neither subtract nor add. The thing is amazing: it is precisely built from beginning to end. It has the purity and logic of a new creation - I would say, a new biological species, who knows how it ended up in the wild. She really is like a nimble, wonderful fluffy animal, lively and bouncy. Next to “The Fox,” most of the stories look pale—like wind-up mechanical toys.From an article by H.G. Wells (1923)

Thank you so much for D[David’s] story. An extremely successful thing - I don’t remember anything like it in recent times. In my opinion, the essence of human psychology and the behavior of the beast is captured very accurately. A masterpiece of its own - it’s sometimes sad to read, sometimes funny, and there is not a single wrong note (as far as I can tell) in intonation, style, or concept. In short, an impeccably constructed story - congratulations to David for me. From a letter from Joseph Conrad to Edward Garnett (1922)