The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories

Oliver James It’s possibly the best short story ever written, depending on whether or not you consider The Leopard [Giuseppe di Lampedusa] to be a short story, but it is only about 50 pages or so. It describes how easy it is to go through life, in the same way as Eliot describes in ‘Prufrock’, trying to please everyone and to be a good person, to conform, without really having any authentic intimacy with anyone. And the great importance really of waking up and smelling the coffee and seeing that the superficial things in life really are superficial and that what actually matters is how you conduct... (Source)