A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
A solitary traveler watches a fairy circle a divided island as sunset turns the scene into a vision of aging and death.
Two newly immortal spirits cross the stars while one explains how every word and action continues to shape the universe.
A Parisian family’s summer outing opens a brief, charged interval between ordinary life and a happiness that cannot last.
A narrator studying a famously irresistible man finds the strongest clue to his charm in a woman’s portrait at home.
A visitor to an asylum reads the journal of a collector whose antique cabinet concealed a relic that consumed his mind and desire.
A dazzling Mediterranean boat ride turns from news of disaster to a friend’s indecorous tale about snow.
Two lovers exchange letters over whether physical desire corrupts love or completes it.
A man who believes himself untouched by age meets the woman he once adored and sees twelve lost years all at once.
A solitary walker falls in love with a seaside house—and with the unknown woman whose photograph hangs inside.
When distant Corsica appears across the evening sea, an old traveler recalls a noblewoman who gave up society for lasting love.
A severe priest sets out to confront his niece’s secret lover, but the moonlit countryside challenges his certainty.
An aging actress welcomes a traveler into the flower-covered villa where she lives with portraits of the men who loved her.
A hunter in a frozen marsh witnesses a wild bird's devotion and finds his sport transformed by the sight.
In a quiet Paris garden, a young law student befriends two forgotten dancers who still inhabit the manners of another century.
A young wife returns from Switzerland with a confession about one moonlit night beside Lake Lucerne.
A lover of darkness wanders through Paris as the familiar city falls silent and dawn seems to recede beyond reach.
A writer reflects on the attraction and menace of cats before recalling a night when one seemed to rule an old castle.
A night of torch fishing on the Algerian coast leads an old school friend to disclose the jealousy that drove him from France.
Alone in the house of her whole life, an elderly woman writes to a friend about memory, aging, and the objects that preserve vanished lives.
On a nighttime walk through Paris, a convivial dinner guest argues that no friendship or love can breach the solitude of the mind.
A man with no obvious catastrophe explains why thirty years of repetition and one drawer of old letters have made life unbearable.
Letters hidden inside an old chasuble reveal a bedridden woman’s intimate meditation on the object that holds birth, love, illness, and death.
An Indian prince’s cremation beneath the cliffs of Étretat confronts a French resort town with an unfamiliar rite.
An exile has built a fortune around one plan: return to the woman whose love ruined him.
