A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The narrator’s attitude toward the story.
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.
A practiced seducer meets a married woman at a seaside resort and discovers that their affair has become more serious than either expected.
At an isolated railway tavern, two devout cousins clash over faith, money, and family rights as resentment turns dangerous.
While showing an architect a condemned tenement, a landlord recalls how one family’s ordinary poverty became a rapid descent.
A cheerful student rides the night mail and discovers that another man’s adventure can be a lifetime of cold, danger, and resentment.
A gravely ill schoolmaster insists on attending the annual dinner that celebrates his pupils, determined to reject every hint of weakness.
A mesmerist tests whether hypnosis can hold a dying man at the point between life and death.
In a snowbound military hut, a major’s seemingly casual questions expose the dangerous private anxieties beneath his authority.
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.
After the thaw, a peasant brings his wife’s body down from the mountains—and the villagers reveal the grotesque ritual he performed while waiting.
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 rainy Italian hotel, an American wife goes after a stray cat and discovers how many other things she wants.
A veteran boxer plans to lose the fight that will end his career—but keeping the money may demand one last act of courage.
While waiting for a train through Spain, a couple circles the life-changing decision neither can name directly.
In a Milan hospital after the fighting, wounded soldiers submit their bodies to machines while trying to imagine who they will be afterward.
War, revolution, bullfights, and executions flash past in hard-edged scenes where courage and brutality become nearly indistinguishable.
A boy accompanies his doctor father across a dark lake to help a woman in labor, entering a night of pain, birth, and adult mystery.
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.
A boy’s holiday glow collapses when his father reveals that the girl he loves has chosen someone else.
After being thrown from a freight train, Nick Adams finds food and company beside a campfire—but the prizefighter waiting there is not safe.
A doctor’s claim to some driftwood is challenged by the lumberman who knows exactly where the logs came from.
On a moonlit fishing trip, Nick and Marjorie circle the quiet truth that their relationship has stopped being what it was.
A young Hungarian revolutionary crosses postwar Italy with no money, a party credential, and an unwavering faith in the world revolution.
