A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the story is told.
After the thaw, a peasant brings his wife’s body down from the mountains—and the villagers reveal the grotesque ritual he performed while waiting.
A writer reads a magazine’s promises of Romance while, far away, a famous bullfighter dies and is reduced to souvenir pictures.
In a rainy Italian hotel, an American wife goes after a stray cat and discovers how many other things she wants.
In a Milan hospital after the fighting, wounded soldiers submit their bodies to machines while trying to imagine who they will be afterward.
War, revolution, bullfights, and executions flash past in hard-edged scenes where courage and brutality become nearly indistinguishable.
A young Harvard poet and his older bride cross the Atlantic determined to begin a perfect marriage, but Europe has other distractions.
A boy’s holiday glow collapses when his father reveals that the girl he loves has chosen someone else.
A young Hungarian revolutionary crosses postwar Italy with no money, a party credential, and an unwavering faith in the world revolution.
In a small Michigan town, Liz Coates builds a private romance around the blacksmith whose return from a hunting trip changes everything.
A traveler in the Auvergne keeps meeting a solitary old woman whose grief finally breaks through her reserve.
A road trip through Normandy leads to a chapel keeper who sells homemade saints and measures his drunkenness by degrees.
A narrator studying a famously irresistible man finds the strongest clue to his charm in a woman’s portrait at home.
A sharp-tongued rail traveler records the sights, absurdities, and unsettling stories encountered along the French Riviera.
A dazzling Mediterranean boat ride turns from news of disaster to a friend’s indecorous tale about snow.
A rural court must decide whether an older woman can reclaim land from the young man she raised, supported, and expected never to leave.
A caustic observer attacks Parisian politicians, journalists, and friends whose charm masks fickle loyalties and flexible principles.
An aging actress welcomes a traveler into the flower-covered villa where she lives with portraits of the men who loved her.
A hunter in a frozen marsh witnesses a wild bird's devotion and finds his sport transformed by the sight.
In a quiet Paris garden, a young law student befriends two forgotten dancers who still inhabit the manners of another century.
A writer reflects on the attraction and menace of cats before recalling a night when one seemed to rule an old castle.
An imperious old maid’s final illness exposes the private life she never allowed anyone to see.
Alone in the house of her whole life, an elderly woman writes to a friend about memory, aging, and the objects that preserve vanished lives.
Letters hidden inside an old chasuble reveal a bedridden woman’s intimate meditation on the object that holds birth, love, illness, and death.
At a country christening, a priest discovers an unexpected tenderness as he holds his newborn nephew among the reveling family.
