A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Where does the story take place?
A frightened schoolboy’s failed Greek exam becomes a family crisis about poverty, ambition, and punishment.
A village choirmaster drills his singers for months to impress a visiting count who may not care to hear them.
A teacher terrified of disorder hides behind rules and routines, until a lively woman and her defiant brother disturb his sealed existence.
A solemn student prankster tests a famous duelist’s pride with an insult designed to turn etiquette against 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 schoolboy's joke links a lonely Latin master with a laundress and gives a lesson no classical text can provide.
A former prosecutor recalls the admired schoolmaster accused of feeding children sweets laced with glass and broken needles.
Bullied because he has no father, a village boy asks a kindly blacksmith to give him a name his classmates cannot mock.
A poor scholarship student makes one accidental movement during an exam and must decide whether winning matters more than his principles.
A chemistry accident sends an ordinary schoolmaster into a shadow world that overlaps the lives of everyone he knew.
When Bertie says he wants a house full of children, a stop at a girls’ school puts the idea to a test.
A student in a celebrated writing course objects to his professor’s rules for describing aliens and other planets.
Years after leaving school, a former pupil remembers the aging English teacher his class turned into an object of relentless laughter.
13 stories
