THE THIRTEEN TALES IN THIS VOLUME - a baker's dozen of stories - were all written by Russian émigrés, writers who fled their native country in the early twentieth century to avoid the turmoil of war and revolution. And while the stories are the work of nine very different writers, who all had very different experiences of exile, all are united by a single theme: mystery. You will also find a fair dose of magic and mysticism here, of terror and the supernatural. There are Petersburg revenants, grief-stricken avengers, Lithuanian vampires, flying skeletons, murders and duels, and even a ghostly Edgar Allen Poe.