The Exclamation Mark

A civil servant stands accused of not understanding the rules of punctuation. He begins to go through the correct use of commas and semicolons, before arriving at the exclamation mark - which, he realizes, in forty years of writing he has never used. His uncertainty spirals into a bizarre and paranoid fantasy, as everyday objects transform themselves into malevolent exclamation marks...
Written between 1885 and 1886, when Anton Chekhov was on the verge of becoming a literary celebrity, this endearing collection of early stories reveals the comic talents of Russia's most celebrated dramatist and short-story writer.
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Anton Chekhov is one of Russia's most highly regarded dramatists and short-story writers. Most famous for his plays The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, The Seagull, and Three Sisters, he also penned a remarkable number of short pieces, and his work has enjoyed considerable success both in Russia and beyond. Acclaimed by twentieth-century writers such as Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and Samuel Beckett, Chekhov's writing continues to have a profound influence on writers of all nationalities.