This is the first English-language collection of stories by the nineteenth-century writer Boleslaw Prus, who has been called the greatest Polish novelist of all time. While some of his major novels have been translated into English, there has been no definitive collection of his short fiction until now.

This new work, containing twelve of Prus's classic shorter pieces, explores the full range of his talent - the depth of thought, human warmth, accuracy of observation, and technical excellence for which he has been justly praised. The stories range in tone from the whimsical ("Stas's Little Adventure") to the tragic ("The Waistcoat"), and are peopled with intriguing characters in settings from nineteenth-century Warsaw to Egypt at the time of the Pharaohs.

Even the natural world doesn't escape Prus's eye for detail: the lives of humans are as influenced by the growth patterns of fungi as by the bite of a deadly spider. Prus's deep compassion for the human condition and his profound understanding of human joy and suffering run throughout this collection.

In all the stories, the tightness of construction is matched by a deceptive simplicity of language. Prus's vocabulary is chosen with immense care, though it flows with a rare naturalness. He is sentimental without being maudlin, comic without being cruel, and metaphysical without being pretentious. It is not without reason that he is known as one of the greatest stylists Poland has produced.