A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
Two strangers take over a small-town lunchroom and wait for a former prizefighter who knows exactly why they have come.
As an autumn storm lashes Michigan, Nick Adams and Bill drink by the fire and talk around the breakup Nick cannot quite explain.
After the crucifixion, three Roman soldiers drink, joke, and circle the question of what it means to endure suffering.
A self-styled naïve bachelor warns husbands after a lover's drunken confession unsettles his ideas about courtship.
An eighteenth-century grandmother hears modern tales of jealous revenge and gives her sheltered granddaughter a scandalous lesson about love and marriage.
Six years after separating over her affair, a proud baron wakes on a train opposite the wife he barely recognizes.
A nostalgic former clerk recalls the sunny Sunday walk when helping a lost couple led him far from his map and his innocence.
On New Year's Eve, a married woman asks her lover to prove whether his promises can survive a choice with real consequences.
A road trip through Normandy leads to a chapel keeper who sells homemade saints and measures his drunkenness by degrees.
On his wedding night, an ardent Norman sportsman must choose between his waiting bride and suspected poachers.
A young joiner on trial for a double murder rejects an insanity defense and demands judgment on his own account.
A provincial music lover enters a Paris artist’s studio expecting celebrities and finds himself drafted into a chaotic housewarming.
A rural assize tries two drunken men whose attempt to price a wife by volume turns marriage, commerce, and justice into grotesque comedy.
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.
A landowner recalls forcing his pregnant servant into a marriage arranged to protect his own name.
A newlywed tells his oldest friend that marital passion is ruining his health, then finds an arrangement that restores him.
When a grandmother asks a gentle priest why he chose solitude, he recalls the childhood attachment that taught him to fear ordinary happiness.
A French settler in colonial Algeria recalls the restless woman whose freedom never fit the life he tried to give her.
A doctor explains how a married woman, a dead lover, and an imminent homecoming demanded instant deception.
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.
A faithless husband grows jealous when his independent wife attracts attention, and she answers his renewed desire with a price.
A self-assured traveler plots a conquest on the road to Corsica, certain he has read his companion correctly.
