A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
Two childhood friends reunite warmly at a railway station until one learns the other’s official rank.
A minor clerk bursts home ecstatic that his name has appeared in print, whatever the reason.
Prescribed total rest in a nursery with barred windows, a young wife begins to study the wallpaper.
A murderer explains how he killed an old man, then hears a sound that destroys his confidence when police arrive.
On a train to Paris, a proudly controlling mother carries a caged bird home while unknowingly passing the wreckage of her daughter’s love.
In a snowbound military hut, a major’s seemingly casual questions expose the dangerous private anxieties beneath his authority.
A wounded soldier and a nurse fall in love in wartime Milan, trying to make a future together before the front and the armistice pull them apart.
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.
Nick Adams walks away from a burned town into the Michigan wilderness, building a camp and fishing the river one careful act at a time.
In a rainy Italian hotel, an American wife goes after a stray cat and discovers how many other things she wants.
Two young friends race down an Alpine mountain, then linger over wine as marriage, school, and the end of freedom wait for them below.
While waiting for a train through Spain, a couple circles the life-changing decision neither can name directly.
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 boy accompanies his doctor father across a dark lake to help a woman in labor, entering a night of pain, birth, and adult mystery.
A wounded lieutenant keeps vigil against sleep, replaying memory, prayer, and imagined trout streams to hold his soul together after the war.
A veteran returns to his Oklahoma home after the war and finds that the town, his family, and the future they expect no longer fit him.
A doctor’s claim to some driftwood is challenged by the lumberman who knows exactly where the logs came from.
On a moonlit fishing trip, Nick and Marjorie circle the quiet truth that their relationship has stopped being what it was.
Two strangers take over a small-town lunchroom and wait for a former prizefighter who knows exactly why they have come.
A young Hungarian revolutionary crosses postwar Italy with no money, a party credential, and an unwavering faith in the world revolution.
An aging bullfighter takes a cheap night fight in Madrid, determined to prove that the old skill and courage are still in him.
23 stories
