It's hard to describe this collection of short stories except to say maybe that it's very Russian. That is, it's about Russian people in Russia now, with all the idiosyncrasies and flaws of character and society that one can imagine from that. It made me laugh plenty of times, and usually ended without a real note of finality--like Chekhov. The author (also like Chekhov) is a doctor as well as an author so a lot of the stories are drawn from his own work.