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A hotel waiter misplaces a piano-tuner’s boots, sending their anxious owner into an increasingly dangerous mix-up.
A self-declared man of violent temper tries to study dog licences while a determined young woman assigns him a romance.
A toddler’s first walk beyond the nursery turns ordinary streets, strangers, animals, and sounds into an overwhelming new universe.
A seasoned prosecutor discovers that reasoning with his seven-year-old son is harder than addressing any court.
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.
A man tries to explain why the ordinary habits that once irritated him become forgivable when they belong to the woman he loves.
A homeopathic healer’s grateful patients praise miraculous cures before mentioning their urgent material needs.
Two men look up at a flock of starlings, and an entire town manufactures a crisis around their gaze.
When his sister leaves home for a married neighbor, a self-described liberal rides out to settle the scandal and tests his own beliefs.
After an evening of ghost stories, a rational architect finds that a dark, empty house is more than his nerves can bear.
A frightened surveyor invents a fearsome reputation to protect himself on a night journey—and makes his driver even more afraid.
A rational man recalls three ordinary sights that, in solitude and darkness, became sources of overpowering terror.
A boastful young lover challenges a lawyer to argue him out of marriage—and discovers how quickly conviction can yield to eloquence.
An accomplished engineer complains that the public knows performers and criminals better than builders and scholars—until his seatmate tests the claim.
A dignified old gardener answers a debate about justice with a legend about a town’s extraordinary faith in human goodness.
A stranded hospital assistant seeks shelter at a rural inn and finds himself drawn to the dangerous freedom of its notorious guests.
A vain provincial actor’s boast about a conquest turns dangerous when one listener knows the woman and demands satisfaction.
On New Year’s Eve, a young woman peers into a mirror for a glimpse of marriage and sees far more of its demands than she expected.
A gifted speechmaker is hired to honor a dead civil servant, but his polished tribute proves more reusable than anyone expected.
A provincial household prepares for a high-ranking uncle whose summer visit unsettles its routines, loyalties, and ideas about cultivated life.
A vanished rake, a locked room, and one foreign match send two investigators racing toward an elaborate murder theory.
A timid traveler is mistaken for a space-polo expert, then forced into a deadly match with his ship and reputation at stake.
A stranded fugitive boards a living spaceship and begins planning how to make its extraordinary power his own.
When a reclusive professor’s familiar street begins to lose blocks and buildings, an old theory about reality becomes his only explanation.
