Twelve Stories [Russian]

This books consists of twelve relatively short (three to five pages, roughly) stories by Mikhail Zoshchenko, a Soviet satirist. His style reminds me a little of Mark Twain's short stories - deadpan but exaggerated. These stories describe life in communal apartments and other aspects of Soviet life in a humorous fashion -- for example, the squabbles of communal apartment dwellers over the electric bill. The simplicity of the stories (there is not a lot of internal thought processes described, and there is a lot of dialogue) make it fairly easy for a low-intermediate student to read and enjoy, with the help of the annotations. One warning - Zoshchenko uses a lot of slang terminology which is likely to be unfamiliar to such readers, and can take a little unraveling.