The first of the Penguin Little Black Classics series that I’ve read — having bought a whole shelf of them a few years back — and it’s a good one. Chekhov is described as having ‘perfected the short story’ and the three stories in this slender volume offer some evidence of that. The best of the three is the first one, ‘The Kiss’, a tale of imagination, sexual desire, fantasy, and loneliness. With just one character of significance, and 25 pages long, it’s not exactly ‘War and Peace’, but is a great example of what a short story can be.