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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.
A writer reads a magazine’s promises of Romance while, far away, a famous bullfighter dies and is reduced to souvenir pictures.
A road trip through Italy becomes a tour of suspicious officials, theatrical hospitality, and the small absurdities of a country under Fascism.
A boy’s holiday glow collapses when his father reveals that the girl he loves has chosen someone else.
In a small Michigan town, Liz Coates builds a private romance around the blacksmith whose return from a hunting trip changes everything.
A self-styled naïve bachelor warns husbands after a lover's drunken confession unsettles his ideas about courtship.
Keeping vigil beside their revered mother, two austere children open the letters that preserve her private life.
After a revered judge dies, his private papers expose a lifelong authority’s hidden appetite for killing.
Six years after separating over her affair, a proud baron wakes on a train opposite the wife he barely recognizes.
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 narrator studying a famously irresistible man finds the strongest clue to his charm in a woman’s portrait at home.
A sharp-tongued rail traveler records the sights, absurdities, and unsettling stories encountered along the French Riviera.
A French settler in colonial Algeria recalls the restless woman whose freedom never fit the life he tried to give her.
A respectable provincial woman visits Paris determined to sample the glamorous vice she has imagined from newspapers and fashionable gossip.
An old marquis confesses why one visit to a dead woman’s locked bedroom left him afraid of darkness for life.
A doctor explains how a married woman, a dead lover, and an imminent homecoming demanded instant deception.
A vain former minister recalls the ingenious deception that kept a clever bourgeois lover in his life for three years.
A dying disciple of Schopenhauer recalls the night his teacher’s corpse seemed to retain its terrifying power.
A trusted servant attacks his master for money, then becomes the most devoted nurse the wounded man could ask for.
A retired notary asks for a divorce after discovering the ingenious history behind his wife’s advertised fortune.
Lonely and aging, a Parisian baron travels south to meet the grown son he secretly supported but has never seen.
A letter from a former lover forces an aging bachelor to compare his remembered youth with the man he has become.
A lonely traveler reunites with a boastful school friend whose lavish home hides an unexpected family business.
