Minus the Imple is a fictionalized true story about one man's quest to find the answers to the phenomena that punctuate his experiences throughout his life. It's a story about love and loss, faith and humanity. Does the human soul really exist, or is it merely a reassuring notion most people fully accept as real? Why do we believe in some things we have never seen, and yet we refuse to accept other notions that can't be ruled impossible? Faith is a curious thing. We will believe what we will. Minus the Imple will make you think as you review unexplainable episodes from your own past. All you...

From the reign of the Tsars in the early nineteenth century to the collapse of the Soviet Union and beyond, the short story has long occupied a central place in Russian culture. Included here are pieces from many of the acknowledged masters of Russian literature--including Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn--alongside tales by long-suppressed figures such as the subversive Kryzhanowsky and the surrealist Shalamov. Whether written in reaction to the cruelty of the bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy of communism, or the torture of the prison camps, they offer a wonderfully...