A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
A calendar event within the story.
At an Epiphany fête, three prosperous old men recall what severe cold meant before wealth protected them from it.
A captive court jester must design one more masquerade for the king who treats him and his friend as property.
A connoisseur leads his insulter down into the family catacombs to settle a score over a rare sherry.
A traveler joins a sparsely attended funeral and learns how a town punished a woman for the violence done to her as a child.
A provincial town crowns its shyest young man as a model of virtue, then watches its solemn civic experiment take an unruly turn.
A miserly Norman farmer resists his son's marriage, then finds his rigid household altered by love, loss, and the demands of survival.
Amid Cannes’s flower festival, two fashionable women compare the vanity and danger hidden inside the wish to be desired.
A masked dancer collapses at a Paris ball, and the face beneath his disguise leads a doctor into a marriage shaped by vanity and endurance.
A peasant clown leaves the hospital with a healed leg and twenty-five francs, then spends his reward on a hazardous return to pleasure.
Maria leaves the laundry for a Halloween visit with the family she helped raise.
A New Orleans agent visits a Louisiana plantation and grows close to a woman already engaged to a local painter.
Bertie and Jeeves back two unlikely contenders at a village sports day, but their bookmaker has plans of his own.
A gangly schoolmaster courts a farmer’s daughter in a drowsy Hudson Valley town haunted by a headless horseman.
13 stories
