A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How quickly the story moves.
A harmless sound in a wedding kitchen convinces a schoolmaster that scandal is about to ruin him.
A sheltered young woman mistakes theatrical passion for real love and follows a touring actor into his brutal world.
A respectable official finds a bundled baby on his doorstep and assumes his secret affair has finally caught up with him.
Fresh from Crimea, a young wife condemns her companion’s holiday flirtation while describing her own trip in increasingly revealing detail.
An indecent antique passes from one grateful professional to another as each admirer searches for a respectable way to lose it.
After an opera, a sixteen-year-old tries to turn two admirers into the material for her first grand romantic sorrow.
A driver recalls how his little sister carried a village’s money through a forest after robbers attacked their father.
A betrayed husband enters a gun shop with murder in mind, but every purchase forces him to reconsider the price of revenge.
A self-dramatizing widow offers a young writer the tragic story of her life aboard a train.
A sober, pious man steals a midnight drink, swallows paraffin instead, and spends the night preparing for death.
Two small children make newborn kittens the center of their world, while the adults around them barely notice the stakes.
A landowner discovers the exact price of being noticed in a government office.
An anonymous love letter sends a respectable married man to a garden rendezvous, where an unexpected rival refuses to leave.
A barber learns midway through a free haircut that poverty has cost him the woman he loves.
A hotel waiter misplaces a piano-tuner’s boots, sending their anxious owner into an increasingly dangerous mix-up.
Two schoolboys arrive home for Christmas with maps, a pistol, and a secret plan to cross Siberia and seek gold in America.
Two childhood friends reunite warmly at a railway station until one learns the other’s official rank.
A self-declared man of violent temper tries to study dog licences while a determined young woman assigns him a romance.
Two tipsy lawyers take a wrong turn after a long walk from the station and break into the wrong country cottage.
A toddler’s first walk beyond the nursery turns ordinary streets, strangers, animals, and sounds into an overwhelming new universe.
A minor journalist turns one night’s writing into a sacred ordeal, forcing his household to serve the drama of his creativity.
A Russian landowner’s casual nationalism turns a meal with his dependent French companion into an ordeal of insult and control.
A colonel’s widow demands protection from a scandalous hotel guest, then learns one detail that changes her view.
A nervous wife sees a man enter through the kitchen window and sends her sleepy husband into the dark to defend the household’s virtue.
