A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
What would you like to read about?
A shopkeeper keeps selling goods after his funeral, and the whole village comes to see him.
A retired lieutenant spends a sweltering day condemning the town’s idle natives while his own hours slip away.
Once a year, a lazy village drunk becomes an exacting artist whose work belongs to an entire community.
An impatient scholar waits to dismiss his late young secretary, then finds that their digressions are the part of the evening he values most.
A thirteen-year-old servant forced to work without sleep drifts between chores, memories, and visions as a baby cries through the night.
A Sunday animal market in Moscow becomes a crowded portrait of commerce, expertise, affection, and cruelty.
A cattle merchant crosses Russia by freight train, paying at every stop while schedules, regulations, and neglect consume his profit.
One enormous eelpout under a riverbank root draws workers, a shepherd, and their master into the water.
A cheerful student rides the night mail and discovers that another man’s adventure can be a lifetime of cold, danger, and resentment.
A gravely ill schoolmaster insists on attending the annual dinner that celebrates his pupils, determined to reject every hint of weakness.
On the long road back to her village school, an exhausted teacher confronts the life that work and isolation have reduced to routine.
A young teacher wins the domestic happiness he imagined, only to find contentment raising questions about the life he has chosen.
On Christmas Eve, a nine-year-old apprentice writes home for rescue from hunger, beatings, and sleepless work in Moscow.
A proud entrepreneur explains the strict method behind a career built on nuisance, provocation, fraud, and other unusual trades.
After forty years in the same dim office, an aging bookkeeper takes a spring evening walk and sees the life he never lived.
Two hungry strangers sharing a slow train along the Mediterranean coast discover an unusual way to ease each other’s need.
A schoolboy's joke links a lonely Latin master with a laundress and gives a lesson no classical text can provide.
When a fisherman’s arm is trapped in a trawling cable, his captain brother must choose between saving him and saving an expensive net.
A Norman brothel closes for a country confirmation, carrying its lively household from familiar commerce into an unexpected sacred occasion.
A farm servant’s brief romance leaves her facing motherhood, secrecy, and a marriage shaped by work, fear, and rural necessity.
A farming couple schedule a funeral around the colza crop, but the dying old man refuses to cooperate with their practical plans.
An unemployed carpenter walks from town to town seeking work until hunger and official suspicion drive him toward collapse.
A poor, naïve farm girl enters service with a wealthy widower whose demands soon extend far beyond cooking and cleaning.
A chance encounter in a provincial tobacco shop revives a vanished world of river outings, hard work, and ingenious schemes.
