Max Fry is known not only as the creator of the longest and most popular series in the history of Russian fantasy, but also as the author of many collections of stories balancing on the brink of magic and metarealism. “Cards on the Table” is a kind of summing up of the author’s many years of work in this direction. The collection includes stories from different years; the compiler assumes that their sum will reveal to the reader additional meanings of each of the terms and will allow them to form a completely clear idea of the author’s picture of the world. In Russian, “cards on the table” is a stable phrase meaning a requirement to reveal one’s secret intentions. And in the mouths of gamblers, this phrase sounds when there is no longer any point in hiding your trump cards from your rivals. And really, what is there to hide.