A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The readership the story was written for.
Two strangers take over a small-town lunchroom and wait for a former prizefighter who knows exactly why they have come.
A young Hungarian revolutionary crosses postwar Italy with no money, a party credential, and an unwavering faith in the world revolution.
As an autumn storm lashes Michigan, Nick Adams and Bill drink by the fire and talk around the breakup Nick cannot quite explain.
An aging bullfighter takes a cheap night fight in Madrid, determined to prove that the old skill and courage are still in him.
After the crucifixion, three Roman soldiers drink, joke, and circle the question of what it means to endure suffering.
In a small Michigan town, Liz Coates builds a private romance around the blacksmith whose return from a hunting trip changes everything.
Two hunters leave a lonely Norman château for midnight Mass and a condolence call that turns Christmas custom into grim comedy.
A skeptical country doctor recalls the Christmas night when fear, faith, and illness combined to produce what others called a miracle.
A daring flirt makes her persistent admirer earn his chance during a wild-boar hunt at a Norman château.
In a Corsican mountain pass, a traveller hears how a timid orphan became the island’s most feared outlaw.
A Parisian family’s summer outing opens a brief, charged interval between ordinary life and a happiness that cannot last.
News of the Republic reaches a Norman village, where a self-important doctor turns national upheaval into a personal campaign for office.
A celebrated society marksman provokes a duel, then spends a sleepless night confronting the fear his reputation cannot admit.
A self-styled naïve bachelor warns husbands after a lover's drunken confession unsettles his ideas about courtship.
Keeping vigil beside their revered mother, two austere children open the letters that preserve her private life.
In court, a wife's plea for divorce reveals a husband whose worship of ideal beauty has become a fevered obsession.
A peaceable French merchant endures a Prussian officer’s insults until one final humiliation forces him to fight.
After fifteen years apart, a Parisian visits an old friend and finds domestic contentment masking a disturbing family amusement.
When a timid civil servant’s elderly mother is declared dead, grief soon competes with inheritance, office protocol, and his wife’s practical schemes.
An eighteenth-century grandmother hears modern tales of jealous revenge and gives her sheltered granddaughter a scandalous lesson about love and marriage.
A traveler in the Auvergne keeps meeting a solitary old woman whose grief finally breaks through her reserve.
After a revered judge dies, his private papers expose a lifelong authority’s hidden appetite for killing.
Six years after separating over her affair, a proud baron wakes on a train opposite the wife he barely recognizes.
A nostalgic former clerk recalls the sunny Sunday walk when helping a lost couple led him far from his map and his innocence.
