Alexander Selin was born in 1960 in the little town of Volzhsk on the Volga. He graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics Engineering and worked as a physicist for eight years. During that time he wrote prose and plays, film and television scripts, and humorous short stories. He has published two collections of short stories and the novel Videountermenschen. He belongs to that rare Chekhovian type of writer who tells a story not straightforwardly but through a series of carefully chosen and cleverly arranged vivid details.