The two collections of short stories that make up the core of the second volume of Collected Works were published in 1921; however, most of the stories, if not all, are written in the fertile first twenty years of the century for Boutyra.

The volume contains everything from snippets - small stories of one or two pages - to narratives spanning dozens of pages, such as the partially autobiographical Sick Life and certain thematic cycles: love, the life of the tavern - of social margins - and death in Thirty-Two Stories, illness and poverty in Sick Life.

[Excerpt from the text of the introduction to the edition]