A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the story is told.
Nine years after a joyful summer confession, a wealthy woman measures the life she let class and hesitation decide for her.
At a remote railway station on New Year’s Eve, a bored official dares fate to prove that his life can still become worse.
A landowner confides his fear that ordinary life is incomprehensible, unaware that his closest friend desires his wife.
A reclusive scholar's fixation on his cousin's teeth grows stronger as illness changes her body and mind.
After promising his dying cousin that he will never love again, a grieving man leaves their hidden valley and faces a second love.
A widower watches his daughter grow into an exact copy of the wife whose death he once desired.
A condemned man traces his ruin through alcohol, cruelty, and two black cats that seem to expose every crime he hides.
A proud entrepreneur explains the strict method behind a career built on nuisance, provocation, fraud, and other unusual trades.
A connoisseur leads his insulter down into the family catacombs to settle a score over a rare sherry.
A condemned man argues that people are sometimes driven to do what they know will destroy them.
A barber's son explains how plagiarism, paid praise, personal attacks, and business deals made him a national literary authority.
A murderer explains how he killed an old man, then hears a sound that destroys his confidence when police arrive.
A disgraced man recounts how a namesake who looked and acted like him kept appearing whenever he was about to cross a moral line.
After a revered judge dies, his private papers expose a lifelong authority’s hidden appetite for killing.
A young joiner on trial for a double murder rejects an insanity defense and demands judgment on his own account.
A respected man returns to a Breton inn and confronts the human cost of a long-forgotten encounter.
An old woman explains why a ring of a child’s blond hair has made her consider herself a widow all her life.
A suspicious husband takes his wife on a nocturnal hunt, convinced the quarry will expose her betrayal.
A self-assured traveler plots a conquest on the road to Corsica, certain he has read his companion correctly.
A jealous man insists he is sane while recounting the obsession that made him turn against his lover and her horse.
A young wife returns from Switzerland with a confession about one moonlit night beside Lake Lucerne.
A nephew’s Good Friday prank sends a kindly Jesuit to the sickbed of his fiercely anticlerical uncle.
A nervous bridegroom’s wedding-night embarrassment sends him into Paris in search of a drastic remedy.
A servant tried for killing her newborn asks the court to hear how careful plans for motherhood collapsed in one night.
