A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The readership the story was written for.
A doctor explains how a married woman, a dead lover, and an imminent homecoming demanded instant deception.
Two hungry strangers sharing a slow train along the Mediterranean coast discover an unusual way to ease each other’s need.
An eighty-six-year-old health fanatic studies every local death, determined to prove that caution can defeat old age.
A married woman’s secret meetings are repeatedly interrupted by the toddler who sleeps in the next room.
A schoolboy's joke links a lonely Latin master with a laundress and gives a lesson no classical text can provide.
A vain former minister recalls the ingenious deception that kept a clever bourgeois lover in his life for three years.
When a fisherman’s arm is trapped in a trawling cable, his captain brother must choose between saving him and saving an expensive net.
After their child vanishes with a traveling circus, two aging parents spend years searching roads and city churches for one familiar face.
A celebrated cavalry officer returns from war expecting to reclaim his glamorous lover, only to confront a form of sacrifice he cannot understand.
A doctor’s attempt to awaken an intellectually disabled girl’s mind leads her family into a marriage that makes affection another form of confinement.
A dying disciple of Schopenhauer recalls the night his teacher’s corpse seemed to retain its terrifying power.
A faithless husband grows jealous when his independent wife attracts attention, and she answers his renewed desire with a price.
A dazzling Mediterranean boat ride turns from news of disaster to a friend’s indecorous tale about snow.
A young Norman soldier asks his parents to judge the Black woman he hopes to marry on her character rather than her skin.
A charming idler marries a wealthy Englishwoman and devises a careful scheme to preserve both his allowance and his affairs.
Ten travelers flee occupied Rouen, but their escape stalls when a Prussian officer makes one passenger’s body the price of everyone’s freedom.
Two lovers exchange letters over whether physical desire corrupts love or completes it.
A self-assured traveler plots a conquest on the road to Corsica, certain he has read his companion correctly.
A lonely Parisian’s plan for a generous Christmas supper with a stranger develops an alarming complication before bedtime.
A naval officer recalls an Indian expedition where a prince’s troubling gift binds him to a child trapped by courtly power.
A childhood memory of an old seamstress opens onto the secret act of courage that shaped her entire life.
A resentful farm boy assigned to care for an old horse turns an ordinary chore into a test of mercy.
A farm girl’s pregnancy forces her hard-nosed mother to weigh family honor against the price of a weekly coach ride.
A fashionable niece condemns modern manners, and her older aunt answers with a sharper lesson in observation.
