He joins forces with Ippolit Matveyevich Vorobyaninov, a former nobleman who has returned to his hometown to find a cache of missing jewels which were hidden in some chairs that have been appropriated by the Soviet authorities. The search for the bejeweled chairs takes these unlikely heroes from the provinces to Moscow to the wilds of Soviet Georgia and the Trans-caucasus mountains; on their quest they encounter a wide variety of characters: from opportunistic Soviet bureaucrats to aging survivors of the prerevolutionary propertied classes, each one more selfish, venal, and ineffective than the one before.

    Found in a Bottle', Bret Harte’s 'The Outcasts of Poker Flat', Sherwood Anderson’s 'Death in the Woods', Stephen Vincent Benét’s 'By the Waters of Babylon'. Also some little-known masterpieces as Edith Wharton’s 'The Dilettante', Finley Peter Dunne’s 'Mr. Dooley on the Popularity of Fireman', Charles M. Flandrau’s 'A Dead Issue', and James Reid Parker’s 'The Archimandrite's Niece'.There are also splendid offerings from Melville, Henry James, Dreiser, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, McCullers, Irwin Shaw, John Cheever and Erskine Caldwell.

    A retired English professor who began writing fiction at the age of 70, Maclean produced what is now recognized as one of the classic American stories of the twentieth century. Originally published in 1976, A River Runs through It and Other Stories now celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary, marked by this new edition that includes a foreword by Annie Proulx.Maclean grew up in the western Rocky Mountains in the first decades of the twentieth century. As a young man he worked many summers in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service. The two novellas and short story in this collection are based on his own experiences—the experiences of a young man who found that life was only a step from art in its structures and beauty. The beauty he found was in reality, and so he leaves a careful record of what it was like to work in the woods when it was still a world of horse and hand and foot, without power saws, "cats," or four-wheel drives. Populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, and set in the small towns and surrounding trout streams and mountains of western Montana, the stories concern themselves with the complexities of fly fishing, logging, fighting forest fires, playing cribbage, and being a husband, a son, and a father.