A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How quickly the story moves.
After an evening of ghost stories, a rational architect finds that a dark, empty house is more than his nerves can bear.
A weary court official reaches his summer villa hungry for dinner and rest, only to find that family life has no place ready for him.
Returning to his changed hometown, an aging architect confronts the cost of a divorce he once left others to arrange.
An eight-year-old starving on a Moscow street fixates on a restaurant sign and an unknown food called oysters.
A rational man recalls three ordinary sights that, in solitude and darkness, became sources of overpowering terror.
A merchant’s self-righteous tale about an orphan’s mother forces two unhappy village women to consider the limits of obedience.
A bitter coffin maker counts every human experience as a financial loss until illness at home forces a different reckoning.
A thirteen-year-old servant forced to work without sleep drifts between chores, memories, and visions as a baby cries through the night.
While Easter bells summon the city outside, an impoverished clerk spends another holiday night trapped in a smoky office.
Driving his gravely ill wife through a blizzard, a drunken turner discovers remorse only when time is almost gone.
A penniless painter prepares to leave his summer lodging while dreaming of fame and avoiding the young woman who believes in his future.
A landowner confides his fear that ordinary life is incomprehensible, unaware that his closest friend desires his wife.
Two chance encounters with remarkable young women leave a traveler pondering why beauty can bring as much sadness as delight.
A lawyer catches a beggar lying, offers him work, and assumes stern advice is enough to restore a life.
A banker’s reckless wager condemns a young lawyer to fifteen years of voluntary solitude for a fortune.
During Holy Week, an ailing bishop longs to meet his visiting mother as a son rather than as the distant office everyone sees.
Unable to sleep in a provincial chemist’s shop, a lonely young wife welcomes two officers whose late-night errand becomes open flirtation.
A chorus girl opens her door to her lover’s desperate wife and is made to answer for money she never received and choices she did not make.
A seven-year-old watches the household arrange its cook’s marriage and struggles to understand why a stranger can claim authority over her.
On Easter morning, a newly married farmer passes a sick soldier on the road and cannot quiet his conscience afterward.
Olenka can live only through someone else’s passions, adopting each beloved’s work, worries, and opinions as her own.
An impoverished old man can no longer feed the horse and dog that depend on him, yet neither anger nor dismissal can break their attachment.
As a child lies gravely ill, his mother and longtime doctor confront a question that has festered between them for years.
On the road to an inquest, a magistrate challenges a doctor to explain a healthy woman’s precisely foretold death.
