A range of different authors—some more famous than others—are represented here but the stories themselves vary wildly in length and quality, with the translator directly stating in the introduction that she chose them arbitrarily, because of her own preferences instead of their representative value, thematic connotations, or otherwise. Given that the stories are all satires or offer some sort of social and political commentary, the deliberate absence of works that comment on the world at large, war, capitalism, internationalism, and other topics—things that would have very much been part of the milieu of the creative arts in the Soviet Union—seems like a glaring omission which then can only hope to offer a limited perspective on the writers and their works. More's the pity given that few of the authors here are translated elsewhere, were never officially published, or are out of print even in Russian.