The present volume of translations is based on the 2008 Vozvrash-chenie collection of short stories by Georgii Georgievich Demidov (1908-1987) titled Chudnaya planeta [A Wondrous Planet], from which Valentina Georgievna's reminiscence of her father and Marietta Chudakova's afterword also are drawn. With this translation Vozvrashchenie and its team of translators makes Georii Demidov's remarkable talent available to English-language readers. The five stories contained herein were selected from the nine published in the original Russian-language edition with an eye to the universality of the situations they present, which extends far beyond the limits of Stalin's GULag.