A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Recurring elements in the story’s premise.
On a train to Paris, a proudly controlling mother carries a caged bird home while unknowingly passing the wreckage of her daughter’s love.
Nick Adams walks away from a burned town into the Michigan wilderness, building a camp and fishing the river one careful act at a time.
A road trip through Italy becomes a tour of suspicious officials, theatrical hospitality, and the small absurdities of a country under Fascism.
Two young friends race down an Alpine mountain, then linger over wine as marriage, school, and the end of freedom wait for them below.
While waiting for a train through Spain, a couple circles the life-changing decision neither can name directly.
A young couple follows a drunken local guide out of Cortina for an illegal trout-fishing trip that keeps slipping further out of reach.
A young Hungarian revolutionary crosses postwar Italy with no money, a party credential, and an unwavering faith in the world revolution.
A traveler in the Auvergne keeps meeting a solitary old woman whose grief finally breaks through her reserve.
A nostalgic former clerk recalls the sunny Sunday walk when helping a lost couple led him far from his map and his innocence.
A sharp-tongued rail traveler records the sights, absurdities, and unsettling stories encountered along the French Riviera.
Two hungry strangers sharing a slow train along the Mediterranean coast discover an unusual way to ease each other’s need.
After their child vanishes with a traveling circus, two aging parents spend years searching roads and city churches for one familiar face.
Ten travelers flee occupied Rouen, but their escape stalls when a Prussian officer makes one passenger’s body the price of everyone’s freedom.
A self-assured traveler plots a conquest on the road to Corsica, certain he has read his companion correctly.
Lonely and aging, a Parisian baron travels south to meet the grown son he secretly supported but has never seen.
Three protected schoolboys share a railway carriage with a woman whose sudden crisis defeats every adult precaution.
A stagecoach full of villagers turns one man’s earache into a public medical emergency and a traveling comedy.
An old colonial officer recalls a seven-man punitive expedition whose celebrated success depended on ruthless deception and force.
A forgotten spa diary records twenty-five days of treatments, flirtation, boredom, and selective moral philosophy.
A Paris office clerk explains how one disastrous Sunday cured him of the country—and of marriage.
On a train, a magistrate recognizes a former officer whose war injuries seem to confirm a familiar tale of lost love.
During a police roundup in rainy Paris, a young prostitute tells a passerby how poverty, abuse, and the law narrowed her choices.
A reluctant traveler bound for Italy meets an aloof young woman whose sudden proposal reshapes his carefully planned holiday.
A disabled beggar, rejected from every familiar door, sets out hungry across a winter landscape governed by suspicion and contempt.
