A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Where does the story take place?
A road trip through Italy becomes a tour of suspicious officials, theatrical hospitality, and the small absurdities of a country under Fascism.
A veteran boxer plans to lose the fight that will end his career—but keeping the money may demand one last act of courage.
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 young Harvard poet and his older bride cross the Atlantic determined to begin a perfect marriage, but Europe has other distractions.
A boy follows his jockey father through the racecourses of Italy and France, learning to love the horses, the crowds, and the man who rides them.
Two strangers take over a small-town lunchroom and wait for a former prizefighter who knows exactly why they have come.
An aging bullfighter takes a cheap night fight in Madrid, determined to prove that the old skill and courage are still in him.
After the crucifixion, three Roman soldiers drink, joke, and circle the question of what it means to endure suffering.
A celebrated society marksman provokes a duel, then spends a sleepless night confronting the fear his reputation cannot admit.
A self-styled naïve bachelor warns husbands after a lover's drunken confession unsettles his ideas about courtship.
When a timid civil servant’s elderly mother is declared dead, grief soon competes with inheritance, office protocol, and his wife’s practical schemes.
On New Year's Eve, a married woman asks her lover to prove whether his promises can survive a choice with real consequences.
A provincial music lover enters a Paris artist’s studio expecting celebrities and finds himself drafted into a chaotic housewarming.
A reluctant officer accepts a respectable woman’s devotion and finds that her passion will not permit an easy retreat.
Two sheltered brothers discover Parisian freedom until their formidable priest uncle arrives at the worst possible hour.
A sharp-tongued rail traveler records the sights, absurdities, and unsettling stories encountered along the French Riviera.
After forty years in the same dim office, an aging bookkeeper takes a spring evening walk and sees the life he never lived.
A newlywed tells his oldest friend that marital passion is ruining his health, then finds an arrangement that restores him.
A respectable provincial woman visits Paris determined to sample the glamorous vice she has imagined from newspapers and fashionable gossip.
A schoolboy's joke links a lonely Latin master with a laundress and gives a lesson no classical text can provide.
A vain former minister recalls the ingenious deception that kept a clever bourgeois lover in his life for three years.
After their child vanishes with a traveling circus, two aging parents spend years searching roads and city churches for one familiar face.
A celebrated cavalry officer returns from war expecting to reclaim his glamorous lover, only to confront a form of sacrifice he cannot understand.
