My first book by Chekhov and I was pleasantly surprised. There's a lot of irony and humour in them, most of which focus on the daily interactions and occurrences in people's lives. Chekhov also uses a variety of different narrative formats (telegrams, epistolary, diary entries) to tell the stories and some of them are only a paragraph long. This made them seem more like fragments of longer tales, they felt incomplete, like little peeks into late 19th century Russian life, but I didn't really mind since I picked up this book specifically for times when I didn't want to read anything too long. But I ended up reading it all in a day anyway, ha! ( )