The Eternal Husband and Other Stories brings together five of Dostoevsky's short masterpieces rendered into English by two of the most celebrated Dostoevsky translators of our time. Filled with many of the themes and concerns central to his great novels -- The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground -- these works display the full range of Dostoevsky's genius. The volume's centerpiece is Dostoevsky's most classically perfect work, The Eternal Husband, which describes the almost surreal meeting of a cuckolded widower and his dead wife's lover. Along with this complete and unabridged short novel, Dostoevsky displays his dark brilliance and satiric vision in four tales that vividly portray his all-too-human subjects. From a government official who shows up univited at an underling's wedding to prove his humanity, to a self-deceiving narrator who struggles futilely to understand his wife's suicide; from a hack writer who attends a funeral and ends up talking with the dead, to the protagonist of "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man," the very last story Dostoevsky wrote, an ecstatic and deeply ironic vision of a society based on love, The Eternal Husband and Other Stories is sterling Dostoevsky -- a collection of emotional power and an uncompromising insight into the human condition.

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