A Seasonal Personal Anthology

The author of Anna Karenina and War and Peace is always going to be remembered as a novelist. But even if those books had somehow gone unwritten it’s still likely, imho, that Tolstoy would enjoy a reputation for greatness purely on the basis of his short fiction, tales which wrestle with hefty themes in an unpretentious and eminently readable manner: 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich' , 'Alyosha the Pot', 'The Forged Coupon', and this, a seemingly simple tale of what can happen to man when besieged by snow.

I’ve contributed a brief piece on Tolstoy’s classic winter tale ‘Master and Man’ to this year’s festive edition of A Personal Anthology, the site where writers curate their favourite works of short fiction into a dream anthology, all of which is overseen by the great Jonathan Gibbs.

You can read the whole thing here.