This book is not a memoir, although Natalia Sats remembers many things in it. "A journey through episodes of one life, stops near interesting people" — this is how she defined the genre of her "Short Stories". The genre is unusual, which is not mentioned in textbooks on literary studies. Natalia Sats was an unusual person herself. She was born at the beginning of the twentieth century, "still under the tsar," and lived through the entire difficult and sometimes terrible twentieth century almost to its very end. And she didn't just live — she passed all the tests, stood up and didn't give up. Everything I dreamed of has come true: Natalia Sats is named after the Theater for Children and Youth founded by her in Alma Ata and the unique Children's Musical Theater in Moscow on Vernadsky Avenue, which has no analogues in the world. "Since childhood, I've been taught to notice the interesting things in every person. ... Human studies! What a necessary science this is! … In the art of theater, you can't create anything without her, you can't lead." Everyone who reads this book will see the author's intense interest in the people around him, his attention to them, his attempt to unravel each one, to notice his uniqueness and dissimilarity. And the people Natalia Sats met in her "journey through life" are as extraordinary, interesting, and vibrant as she is, and she attracted only such people into her orbit. These are Paustovsky and Einstein, Stanislavsky and Mikhail Koltsov, Alexey Tolstoy and Sergei Prokofiev, and many, many others. "The novels of my life" — the most interesting reading: This is a document of the era, a story about people and events, and most importantly, the life story of Natalia Sats herself, a story that is a hundred times more interesting than any novel.