Anton Chekhov, perhaps better known as a world famous classical playwright for works such as "Uncle Vanya" and "The Cherry Orchard" was also a prolific short story writer. "The Schoolmaster and Other Stories" is one of several of his collections. It's a compilation of 30 short stories. Some bizarre, some comical but all very interesting.

This is a concise yet thorough explanation of what might happen to our world in the aftermath of a nuclear war. The myriad of potential effects will be global and wide-spread, and the potentials are glazed over in this short work.

Disagreeable old Miss Terry spends her Christmas Eve getting rid of toys from her childhood toy box. One by one she tosses them onto the sidewalk in front of her house, then secretly watches the little scenes that occur, which seem to confirm her belief that true Christmas spirit does not exist. Then the Angel from her childhood Christmas tree appears to show Miss Terry that she has not yet witnessed the final act of each of those little dramas...Living Age magazine in 1910 observed of The Christmas...

The crime seemed to have lost itself in the sleety cold of the December midnight upon which it was committed. The trails were not blind–there were simply no trails. The circumstances baffled explanation–a lone woman entering an empty taxicab; a run to a distant point in the city; the discovery of the woman’s disappearance, and in her stead the sight of the dead body of a prominent society man–that, and the further blind information that the suit-case which the woman had carried was the property of the man whose body was huddled horribly in the taxicab.

300+ short stories of how smart and savvy various individual animals have been seen to be, and in most cases a little moral is drawn from the story.