A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
What would you like to read about?
A solitary traveler watches a fairy circle a divided island as sunset turns the scene into a vision of aging and death.
A convalescent observer follows an unreadable old man through London, convinced that his need for crowds hides a life of crime.
A failing advance man hides beneath a hotel sheet while alcohol and drugs turn his last escape into a grotesque pursuit he cannot outrun.
In a snowbound military hut, a major’s seemingly casual questions expose the dangerous private anxieties beneath his authority.
Nick Adams walks away from a burned town into the Michigan wilderness, building a camp and fishing the river one careful act at a time.
In a Milan hospital after the fighting, wounded soldiers submit their bodies to machines while trying to imagine who they will be afterward.
A wounded lieutenant keeps vigil against sleep, replaying memory, prayer, and imagined trout streams to hold his soul together after the war.
A veteran returns to his Oklahoma home after the war and finds that the town, his family, and the future they expect no longer fit him.
After being thrown from a freight train, Nick Adams finds food and company beside a campfire—but the prizefighter waiting there is not safe.
On a moonlit fishing trip, Nick and Marjorie circle the quiet truth that their relationship has stopped being what it was.
Two strangers take over a small-town lunchroom and wait for a former prizefighter who knows exactly why they have come.
A traveler in the Auvergne keeps meeting a solitary old woman whose grief finally breaks through her reserve.
After forty years in the same dim office, an aging bookkeeper takes a spring evening walk and sees the life he never lived.
When a grandmother asks a gentle priest why he chose solitude, he recalls the childhood attachment that taught him to fear ordinary happiness.
A confirmed bachelor plans to marry a near stranger because one empty armchair has made solitude unbearable.
A confirmed skeptic of love recalls the moonlit boat ride that briefly unsettled all his carefully reasoned certainty.
A traveler joins a sparsely attended funeral and learns how a town punished a woman for the violence done to her as a child.
A wandering painter befriends an eccentric Englishwoman on the Normandy coast and discovers the feeling beneath her reserve.
A timid husband’s devotion to his son is shaken by a charge that turns family love into an unbearable question.
A lover of darkness wanders through Paris as the familiar city falls silent and dawn seems to recede beyond reach.
A frightened countess helps a wounded stranger cross a border, beginning a wordless bond neither dares disturb.
A seasoned boatman anchors for a quiet smoke on the Seine, only to spend the night trapped in fog, silence, and mounting terror.
An imperious old maid’s final illness exposes the private life she never allowed anyone to see.
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.
