The award-winning translators of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Gogol now bring us a Russian writer ripe for rediscovery whose earthy and exuberant stories, famous in his own country, have never before been properly translated into English.

Leskov's short stories exploded the traditions of nineteenth-century Russian fiction. Innovative in form and richly playful in language, these 17 tales are visionary and fantastic and yet always grounded in reality, peopled by outsized characters that include serfs, princes, military officers, Gypsy girls, wayward monks, horse dealers, nomadic Tartars, and garrulous storytellers. In stories long considered classics Leskov takes the speech patterns of oral storytelling and spins them in new and startlingly modern ways, presenting seemingly artless yarns that are in fact tremendously sophisticated. And it is the great gift of this new translation to allow us to hear all the unexpected nuance of Leskov's singular voice.