Table of Contents

Introduction, by Barry P. Scherr
Translator’s Note
Quarantine
“She”
Lanphier Colony
The Devil of the Orange Waters
The Poisoned Island
The Heart of the Wilderness
The Rat-Catcher
Fandango

About the Author

Alexander Grin, the nom de plume of Alexander Stepanovich Grinevsky (1880–1932), was a leading Russian writer of fantasy and adventure, most famous for the novel Scarlet Sails. His neoromantic fiction won him enduring popularity but eventually ran afoul of the Soviet authorities. Impoverished and increasingly denied the ability to publish, he died of stomach cancer at the age of fifty-one.

Bryan Karetnyk is a teaching fellow and Wolfson Scholar in the Humanities at University College London. He has translated several major works by Gaito Gazdanov and is the editor and principal translator of the anthology Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky (2017).

Reviews

Strange and memorable. Students of modern literature should greet this as if discovering hidden treasure.
*Kirkus Reviews*

Bryan Karetnyk’s sparkling translations bring out both the stylistic intricacy and the psychological depth of Alexander Grin’s tales, calling to mind the “delicate, graceful lacework of fretted leaves” described in “Lanphier Colony.” This expertly edited collection introduces, at long last, the full range of Grin’s gifts to the English-speaking world.
*Boris Dralyuk, executive editor, Los Angeles Review of Books*

Grin’s prose is beautiful, evocative and striking... Fandango is a marvellous collection of stories and Alexander Grin is obviously a writer whose works have been unjustly neglected.
*Shiny New Books*

He deserves to be read for his perceptive analysis of individual will and his imaginative inventiveness. Karetnyk's translation provides an agreeable opportunity to do so.
*SCRSS Digest*

Over thirty years have passed since any of Alexander Grin's extraordinary work was offered to the English reader. In these sensitive and accurate new translations, justice is finally done to Grin's unique world, sometimes reminiscent of Robert Louis Stevenson and Kafka, but inimitable in the subtlety that underlies its simplicity.
*Donald Rayfield, Queen Mary University of London*