A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How quickly the story moves.
A mock scientific essay defines the perfect swindler and catalogs the small cons that make fraud look respectable.
A captive court jester must design one more masquerade for the king who treats him and his friend as property.
A man becomes a social celebrity by making his nose the subject of a supposedly learned science.
A man literally loses his breath and is mistaken for dead through a series of violent mishaps.
A drunk skeptic mocks reports of strange accidents, then meets the official responsible for making unlikely events happen.
A proud entrepreneur explains the strict method behind a career built on nuisance, provocation, fraud, and other unusual trades.
A connoisseur leads his insulter down into the family catacombs to settle a score over a rare sherry.
A vain French duke dies over a badly served delicacy and challenges the Devil to a card game for his freedom.
A wounded traveler finds a portrait so lifelike that he searches a book for the story of the woman it depicts.
A murderer explains how he killed an old man, then hears a sound that destroys his confidence when police arrive.
A newly made Irish baronet competes with a French neighbor for a widow and mistakes every sign for proof that she favors him.
A proud newspaper editor answers a rival's insult with a paragraph built around one letter, then the type runs out.
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.
A writer reads a magazine’s promises of Romance while, far away, a famous bullfighter dies and is reduced to souvenir pictures.
A road trip through Italy becomes a tour of suspicious officials, theatrical hospitality, and the small absurdities of a country under Fascism.
A veteran boxer plans to lose the fight that will end his career—but keeping the money may demand one last act of courage.
War, revolution, bullfights, and executions flash past in hard-edged scenes where courage and brutality become nearly indistinguishable.
After being thrown from a freight train, Nick Adams finds food and company beside a campfire—but the prizefighter waiting there is not safe.
Two strangers take over a small-town lunchroom and wait for a former prizefighter who knows exactly why they have come.
A young Hungarian revolutionary crosses postwar Italy with no money, a party credential, and an unwavering faith in the world revolution.
An aging bullfighter takes a cheap night fight in Madrid, determined to prove that the old skill and courage are still in him.
A daring flirt makes her persistent admirer earn his chance during a wild-boar hunt at a Norman château.
News of the Republic reaches a Norman village, where a self-important doctor turns national upheaval into a personal campaign for office.
