A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the story is told.
A penniless painter prepares to leave his summer lodging while dreaming of fame and avoiding the young woman who believes in his future.
Two chance encounters with remarkable young women leave a traveler pondering why beauty can bring as much sadness as delight.
A Sunday animal market in Moscow becomes a crowded portrait of commerce, expertise, affection, and cruelty.
Unable to sleep in a provincial chemist’s shop, a lonely young wife welcomes two officers whose late-night errand becomes open flirtation.
A seven-year-old watches the household arrange its cook’s marriage and struggles to understand why a stranger can claim authority over her.
Olenka can live only through someone else’s passions, adopting each beloved’s work, worries, and opinions as her own.
One enormous eelpout under a riverbank root draws workers, a shepherd, and their master into the water.
A laboring woman meets the husband who rarely comes home and asks him to stay, if only for a day.
A bailiff meets an old shepherd in a rain-soaked wood, where a dwindling natural world gives voice to their own despair.
A cheerful student rides the night mail and discovers that another man’s adventure can be a lifetime of cold, danger, and resentment.
At his daughter’s requiem, a proud village shopkeeper tries to reconcile religious judgment with the child he barely knew.
On the long road back to her village school, an exhausted teacher confronts the life that work and isolation have reduced to routine.
On a cold Good Friday evening, a theology student tells two widows a Gospel story and is startled by their response.
In a shuttered provincial house, a mother and daughter sew endlessly for a marriage that remains only a hope.
Two impoverished hunters, unable to reclaim a pawned gun, walk to the spring woods to see whether the snipe have arrived.
At a crowded monastery, a traveller shares a room with a young convert whose restless search for learning has left him without a home.
A lost traveler follows an unusually beautiful lane to a cottage where every detail of the house and valley shows careful design.
Seven men shut themselves inside a plague-stricken city and hold a desperate feast beside the body of their dead friend.
An heir uses an immense fortune to create a private landscape meant to surpass nature without losing its beauty.
A solitary traveler watches a fairy circle a divided island as sunset turns the scene into a vision of aging and death.
A wealthy young man rejects status and politics to treat landscape gardening as an art and a plan for a happy life.
On a train to Paris, a proudly controlling mother carries a caged bird home while unknowingly passing the wreckage of her daughter’s love.
In a garden cluttered with bathtubs and boot jacks, a very busy God tries to keep order.
A wounded soldier and a nurse fall in love in wartime Milan, trying to make a future together before the front and the armistice pull them apart.
