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A bitter coffin maker counts every human experience as a financial loss until illness at home forces a different reckoning.
A lawyer catches a beggar lying, offers him work, and assumes stern advice is enough to restore a life.
At an isolated railway tavern, two devout cousins clash over faith, money, and family rights as resentment turns dangerous.
On his wedding night, a reformed libertine receives an urgent summons that brings his abandoned past into his new marriage.
Years after abandoning a pregnant lover, a lonely clerk sees the child he never knew and seeks one brief chance to meet him.
A sheltered young wife befriends the woman named in an anonymous warning about her husband—and trusts them both.
At the Last Judgment, tyrants, saints, and ordinary souls learn that divine scrutiny exposes more than public sins.
A woman estranged from her son takes in a sick child after a family party.
On Easter morning, three children take flowers from a recluse's hill, drawing him back toward the village.
A wet and hungry prankster turns up at a lonely doctor's door during a storm.
A young man pretends to be ill, leaving his godmother to handle work meant for him.
Two young pilgrims seek shelter with a Swiss baron haunted by the daughter he drove away.
A Swiss orphan torn between gratitude and love must reckon with a revolution gathering in her valley.
A ruined lawyer is offered cash for his inherited feud, forcing an old mountain honor code into a startling new bargain.
A fugitive from a Texas gunfight is offered a dangerous new identity in a distant coastal country.
A celebrated safecracker tries to build an honest life under a new name, but his old skills are not finished with him.
A homeless New Yorker tries every trick he can think of to secure a warm winter bed behind bars.
An aging, disgraced navigator claims he can guide a vital supply ship through an asteroid belt after its computers fail.
From Paradise, the Buddha offers a single spider’s thread to a robber suffering at the bottom of Hell.
Impoverished in Tang-dynasty Loyang, Tu Tzuchun is offered a second fortune by an enigmatic old man—but begins to want something different.
20 stories
