The Exclamation Mark And Other Short Stories

A civil servant stands accused of not understanding the rules of punctuation. He begins to go through the correct use of commas and semicolons before arriving at the exclamation mark, which, he realizes, in 40 years of writing, he has never used. From here he develops a bizarre and paranoid fantasy in which everyday objects transform into malevolent exclamation marks. Written when Chekhov was on the verge of becoming a literary celebrity, this is an enlightening new selection that reveals the author’ s often neglected comic talents.

Most famous for his plays The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, Three Sisters, and Uncle Vanya, Anton Chekhov is one of Russia’ s most highly regarded dramatists and short-story writers. Lynne Truss is best known for her globally successful book on punctuation, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, and its best-selling follow-up, Talk to the Hand. She is also the author of three novels and numerous radio comedy dramas and series. Rosamund Bartlett has written widely on Russian literature, music, and art, and is the author of the biographies Chekhov: Scenes from a Life (Free Press) and Tolstoy: A Russian Life (Profile). She is also the translator and editor of Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters (Penguin Classics), Chekhov's About Love and Other Stories (Oxford World’ s Classics), which was shortlisted for the 2005 Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and Anna Karenina (Oxford World’ s Classics). With her fellow trustee of the Anton Chekhov Foundation, Elena Michajlowska, she is the co-editor of Anton Chekhov, Earliest Stories.