He rested for a few minutes, and fell asleep again.
“So?” the editor asked him the following day. “Did you go to the ball? Was it fun?”
“Nothing special,” Pyotr Semyonich replied, handing the editor the piece he had written. “I was bored the whole time. Oh, and yes, I bought a raffle ticket, you owe me a ruble—don’t forget.”
The article was somewhat dry, but rather well-written.
About the Author
ANTON CHEKHOV (1860–1904) is regarded as one of the world’s modern masters of both the play and the short story.
About the Translator
PETER CONSTANTINE’s recent translations include The Essential Writings of Rousseau (Modern Library), The Essential Writings of Machiavelli (Modern Library), Sophocles’ Theban Trilogy (Barnes and Noble Classics), and works by Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Voltaire. His translation of the complete works of Isaac Babel for W. W. Norton received the Koret Jewish Literature Award and a National Jewish Book Award citation. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann. He co-edited A Century of Greek Poetry: 1900–2000, and the anthology The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present, which W. W. Norton published in 2010. He is currently a fellow in Greek/Classics at Columbia.
About Seven Stories Press
SEVEN STORIES PRESS is an independent book publisher based in New York City. We publish works of the imagination by such writers as Nelson Algren, Russell Banks, Octavia E. Butler, Ani DiFranco, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Coco Fusco, Barry Gifford, Martha Long, Luis Negrón, Hwang Sok-yong, Lee Stringer, and Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few, together with political titles by voices of conscience, including Subhankar Banerjee, the Boston Women’s Health Collective, Noam Chomsky, Angela Y. Davis, Human Rights Watch, Derrick Jensen, Ralph Nader, Loretta Napoleoni, Gary Null, Greg Palast, Project Censored, Barbara Seaman, Alice Walker, Gary Webb, and Howard Zinn, among many others. Seven Stories Press believes publishers have a special responsibility to defend free speech and human rights, and to celebrate the gifts of the human imagination, wherever we can. In 2012 we launched Triangle Square books for young readers with strong social justice and narrative components, telling personal stories of courage and commitment. For additional information, visit www.sevenstories.com.