Those who believe that to read Shakespeare in anything but the original is nothing short of sacrilege have obviously never read Urs Widmers retelling of Shakespeares King plays! Widmer has transposed Shakespeares seven plays about betrayal, intrigue, murder and war at the English court into riveting, condensed prose an engaging introduction into a universe of hundreds of characters, but also pure pleasure for Shakespeare-lovers. Although Urs Widmers version remains true to the originals, he recounts the dramas as only he can with imagination and a modern touch, seen from a plethora of perspectives and told in a huge variety of voices, at times pure fairy tale, at times prose, but always captivating. All of this in Widmers inimitable style, as we know it from his successful novels ›A Devoted Life‹ and ›The Book of the Father‹. I imagined throughout that I was recounting events from earlier times, and not that I was describing the theatrical inventions of a writer named Shakespeare. All in all, I have attempted to bring together two ambitions: to write stories at once good and which, irrespective of their literary qualities, can be read as a summary of the original (Urs Widmer in his Introduction).

»You want my biography? Here it is.« It sounds sincere, but Chekhov meant it ironically – in reality he almost never banged his own drum. With an amazing wealth of contemporary photos and documents, this book attempts to approach its subject in the form of a biography in pictures. Far more than an illustrated life story of a great author, the book creates a comprehensive panorama of the history of contemporary Russian thought, the social and political atmosphere upon which Chekhov commented, the surroundings and conditions in which an oeuvre, unparalleled in world literature, came into being.