The Death of Ivan Ilych/Tell me a Riddle

Masters of short fiction illumine questions of pain, suffering, medicine, fate, and, most starkly, “Why am I dying?” Circling in psychological time, Tillie Olsen depicts the death of a working-class grandmother, a past proletarian revolutionary in Russia, and how her death devastates her family in mid-twentieth-century America. Leo Tolstoy’s cancer-ravaged Czarist bureaucrat weighs his life, searching for semblances of meaning in a linear, realistic story...