The Queen of Spades and Other Stories, by Alexander Pushkin, trans. Alan Myers (CUP, £6.99 in UK)

This collection includes the five superb Tales of Bielkin, the incomparable title story, the short historical novel The Captain's Daughter, and Peter the Great's Blackamoor, six chapters from an unfinished novel (Pushkin left a number of incomplete prose works). This last subject had a special fascination for Pushkin, who was himself descended from Hannibal, Peter the Great's negro favourite. Since the other works are all familiar, the sizeable fragment is a relative novelly and it shows that, the poet was as much at home writing of court intrigue as he was of country society. The Queen of Spades is surely Pushkin's prose masterpiece, one of the greatest short stories. ever written and the source of Tchaikovsky's opera.