The first comprehensive collection of Nabokov's short fiction, containing sixty-five stories, was published eighteen years after his death. Nabokov had written the first fifty-five in Russian and later, together with his son Dmitri, translated them into English; he wrote the remaining ten in English after emigrating to America in 1940. Dmitri Nabokov compiled the 1995 volume from the four definitive English collections of thirteen stories each that appeared during his father's lifetime, Nabokov's Dozen, A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, and Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, adding thirteen more, eleven of which had never before been translated into English. The unexpected discovery of an early story, “Easter Rain,” raised the total number of stories in the 1997 Vintage edition to sixty-six.

Nabokov wrote his first story, “The Wood-Sprite,” in 1921, when he was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, and his last, “Lance,” in 1951, when he was teaching literature at Cornell. During that period Nabokov was an émigré writer in Berlin and Paris, a lepidopterist at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, and a professor of literature, first at Wellesley and later at Cornell. He composed nine novels in Russian; the first novel he wrote in English was The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), and his greatest American novels were written after he abandoned the short story. Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), Pale Fire (1962), and the Russian version of his memoir, Drugie berega (1954), that became Speak, Memory (1966) in its final English incarnation, appeared in the following decade.