Masters of short fiction illumine questions of pain, suffering, medicine, fate, and, most starkly, "Why am I dying?"

Tell Me a Riddle
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.

The Death of Ivan Illich
Leo Tolstoy's cancer-ravaged Czarist bureaucrat weighs his life, searching for semblances of meaning in a linear, realistic story.