“Short prose is like a knife blow that leaves a long narcotic effect. The real story is the rigidly strained quintessence of the novel, injected into one go. A story is not written - it is first lived and then minted,” Mikhail Weller said about short stories in an interview with the weekly Argumenty i Vremya. The book includes most of Weller’s best and most characteristic stories. Their diversity and dissimilarity from each other is the author’s constant principle. Collected together, the stories create a novelistic body that is unique in its brightness and originality.