A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
An eight-year-old starving on a Moscow street fixates on a restaurant sign and an unknown food called oysters.
A sick Moscow waiter returns with his wife and daughter to the village he remembers, only to find a family trapped by poverty, drink, and fear.
A dressmaker’s daughter shops for trimmings while a devoted clerk warns that the student she loves may never treat her as an equal.
A sleepy family turns the last evening before Lent into an earnest campaign of lessons, tea, ritual, and still more food.
A thirteen-year-old servant forced to work without sleep drifts between chores, memories, and visions as a baby cries through the night.
Driving his gravely ill wife through a blizzard, a drunken turner discovers remorse only when time is almost gone.
A pompous official receives a tribute from his subordinates whose solemn meaning may not survive the trip home.
A lawyer catches a beggar lying, offers him work, and assumes stern advice is enough to restore a life.
A banker’s reckless wager condemns a young lawyer to fifteen years of voluntary solitude for a fortune.
A chorus girl opens her door to her lover’s desperate wife and is made to answer for money she never received and choices she did not make.
A seven-year-old watches the household arrange its cook’s marriage and struggles to understand why a stranger can claim authority over her.
On Easter morning, a newly married farmer passes a sick soldier on the road and cannot quiet his conscience afterward.
Olenka can live only through someone else’s passions, adopting each beloved’s work, worries, and opinions as her own.
One accidental sneeze sends a timid clerk into an escalating panic over rank, manners, and official displeasure.
As a child lies gravely ill, his mother and longtime doctor confront a question that has festered between them for years.
On the road to an inquest, a magistrate challenges a doctor to explain a healthy woman’s precisely foretold death.
A dignified old gardener answers a debate about justice with a legend about a town’s extraordinary faith in human goodness.
A sick doctor finds a telegram that confirms his wife’s affair and tries to release them both from a ruined marriage.
A laboring woman meets the husband who rarely comes home and asks him to stay, if only for a day.
A practiced seducer meets a married woman at a seaside resort and discovers that their affair has become more serious than either expected.
A small-town mayor sees a visiting Persian dignitary as his best chance to acquire the decoration he covets.
A possible lottery win gives a comfortable couple a sudden view of riches—and of each other.
A teacher terrified of disorder hides behind rules and routines, until a lively woman and her defiant brother disturb his sealed existence.
A widow’s annual temperance luncheon drives her respectable guests to increasingly elaborate errands.
