This book is a collection of Nabokov's stories, written in English from 1943 to 1951, after which he never returned to this genre. In one of his letters, speaking about the release of a collection of his early stories translated into English, he likened it to the remains of raisins and cookies from the bottom of the box. It was these words “from the bottom of the box” that the translator decided to use when choosing a title for the book. You can imagine it standing on a bookshelf next to “Spring in Fialta.”