A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The narrator’s attitude toward the story.
A comfortable reformer judges a village priest unfit for service, then learns what hunger looks like when pride tries to hide it.
A bored husband reads his wife’s rambling letter and lectures her ignorance, exposing a contradiction in what he expects from women.
A family council debates whether to shield a privileged young forger, while the accused listens and decides what kind of man he is.
A harmless sound in a wedding kitchen convinces a schoolmaster that scandal is about to ruin him.
An eloquent abbot leaves his desert monastery to condemn the city’s sins, then discovers how seductive a warning can become.
A writer tends a wounded widower beside his wife’s coffin and listens as he tries to explain a despair he cannot explain to himself.
A respectable official finds a bundled baby on his doorstep and assumes his secret affair has finally caught up with him.
Fresh from Crimea, a young wife condemns her companion’s holiday flirtation while describing her own trip in increasingly revealing detail.
Sheltering from a storm, a fearful forester says wicked men frighten him more than wild beasts—then a cry comes from outside.
A wealthy factory owner spends Christmas confronting the distance between her good intentions, her workers, and the life she longs to lead.
A retired lieutenant spends a sweltering day condemning the town’s idle natives while his own hours slip away.
An idle landscape painter befriends two sisters and finds love complicated by a fierce argument over art, work, and social duty.
A betrayed husband enters a gun shop with murder in mind, but every purchase forces him to reconsider the price of revenge.
A self-dramatizing widow offers a young writer the tragic story of her life aboard a train.
Two small children make newborn kittens the center of their world, while the adults around them barely notice the stakes.
An impoverished young bride enters a joyless marriage, then discovers that beauty can confer a power her husband never expected.
On a Black Sea steamer, a disillusioned landowner recounts how his worship of a beautiful neighbor drew him across Europe.
At Christmas, an elderly village couple hires a letter writer to reach the daughter they have not heard from in four years.
Returning to her family estate, a young heiress finds the freedom of the steppe at odds with the narrow life waiting for her at home.
An anonymous love letter sends a respectable married man to a garden rendezvous, where an unexpected rival refuses to leave.
Five rainy days without her husband send a devoted young wife into town, where his empty flat raises an unwelcome question.
A self-assured critic and his widowed sister grow apart when her search for moral certainty challenges his literary convictions.
A scholar hires a French teacher to advance his research, but discovers that attraction is much easier than conjugation.
Two childhood friends reunite warmly at a railway station until one learns the other’s official rank.
