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A cook who considers himself a great philosopher receives a visit from the Devil and tries to bargain away his soul.
A condemned man traces his ruin through alcohol, cruelty, and two black cats that seem to expose every crime he hides.
A vain young heir falls for a woman he can barely see and rushes toward marriage before he understands who she is.
A newly made Irish baronet competes with a French neighbor for a widow and mistakes every sign for proof that she favors him.
A disgraced man recounts how a namesake who looked and acted like him kept appearing whenever he was about to cross a moral line.
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.
While waiting for a train through Spain, a couple circles the life-changing decision neither can name directly.
A young couple follows a drunken local guide out of Cortina for an illegal trout-fishing trip that keeps slipping further out of reach.
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 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.
As an autumn storm lashes Michigan, Nick Adams and Bill drink by the fire and talk around the breakup Nick cannot quite explain.
A self-styled naïve bachelor warns husbands after a lover's drunken confession unsettles his ideas about courtship.
A suspicious husband takes his wife on a nocturnal hunt, convinced the quarry will expose her betrayal.
A respectable provincial woman visits Paris determined to sample the glamorous vice she has imagined from newspapers and fashionable gossip.
An eighty-six-year-old health fanatic studies every local death, determined to prove that caution can defeat old age.
A vain former minister recalls the ingenious deception that kept a clever bourgeois lover in his life for three years.
A self-assured traveler plots a conquest on the road to Corsica, certain he has read his companion correctly.
A learned provincial doctor finds a manuscript that seems to settle the mystery of the soul—and lets one doctrine consume his reason and household.
Five bored men ask a doctor for a new pleasure, and his account of ether offers more temptation than warning.
A solitary walker falls in love with a seaside house—and with the unknown woman whose photograph hangs inside.
A boulevardier’s sympathy for a young widow in Montmartre Cemetery leads to an affair—and a question about who is hunting whom.
An uninformed bride mistakes her wedding night for an attack, then becomes convinced a playful dog bite has doomed her honeymoon.
