Not only is Shalamov a master of the short story, but his work is a major document about a quarter-century of human suffering in the Soviet labor camps of the Kolyma-Magadan region….

Now 24 of his best tales [Kolyma Tales] are available in English. Taken as a whole—and they are far more powerful read together in a collection than individually—these stories give a picture of the Kolyma horrors as broad as the Siberian waste itself: the mass graves, the endless roads trudged by the laborers, millions of dehumanized men and women kept in bestial conditions. Shalamov's tiny sketches (some are only a few pages long) evoke vast spaces and long years.

At the same time, he gives us striking concrete details of life in a Soviet concentration camp….

Shalamov is a relentlessly honest observer who resorts only occasionally to a muted irony. His view of Russians in...