"Kolyma Stories is a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, an epic array of short fictional tales reflecting the fifteen year that Varlam Shalamov spent in the Soviet Gulag. This is the first of two volumes (the second the appear in 2019) that together will constitute the first complete English translation of Shalamov's stories and the only one to be based on the authorized Russian text. Shalamov spent six years as a slave in the gold mines...