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A man meets a hypnotist he distrusts, then sees his fiancée arrive in town without warning.
Two eager parents try to trap a schoolteacher into marrying their daughter, but their sacred evidence is less reliable than they think.
A practical railway guard hires a matchmaker and explains, in exact detail, the wife required for his future happiness.
A sensitive law student joins two friends on a tour of Moscow brothels and finds himself unable to accept their practiced indifference.
A conscientious husband hires a midwife by night, but his rigid sense of fairness turns every ordinary exchange into an ordeal.
A sheltered young woman mistakes theatrical passion for real love and follows a touring actor into his brutal world.
An impoverished young woman supports a medical student who treats her body, labor, and loyalty as conveniences.
At Christmas, an elderly village couple hires a letter writer to reach the daughter they have not heard from in four years.
A student asks his volatile father for money to return to Moscow, turning an ordinary family dinner into a reckoning none can resolve.
A minor journalist turns one night’s writing into a sacred ordeal, forcing his household to serve the drama of his creativity.
A Russian landowner’s casual nationalism turns a meal with his dependent French companion into an ordeal of insult and control.
A seven-year-old watches the household arrange its cook’s marriage and struggles to understand why a stranger can claim authority over her.
A stranded hospital assistant seeks shelter at a rural inn and finds himself drawn to the dangerous freedom of its notorious guests.
A teacher terrified of disorder hides behind rules and routines, until a lively woman and her defiant brother disturb his sealed existence.
A Latin teacher decides to train a kitten as he trains pupils, with lessons that teach fear more effectively than skill.
A bored passenger on a future balloon tour writes a letter full of confident errors about the nineteenth century.
A perfectly ordered Dutch borough measures life by clocks and cabbages until a strange fiddler crosses the surrounding hills.
A stolen royal letter remains inside a minister's home despite months of secret police searches, and Dupin asks what they failed to see.
A curious traveler visits a private asylum and joins an elegant dinner where every guest seems slightly out of place.
Six years after separating over her affair, a proud baron wakes on a train opposite the wife he barely recognizes.
A rural assize tries two drunken men whose attempt to price a wife by volume turns marriage, commerce, and justice into grotesque comedy.
A French settler in colonial Algeria recalls the restless woman whose freedom never fit the life he tried to give her.
A doctor’s attempt to awaken an intellectually disabled girl’s mind leads her family into a marriage that makes affection another form of confinement.
A self-assured traveler plots a conquest on the road to Corsica, certain he has read his companion correctly.
