Stories

The Death of the Empress of China

In a small blue drawing room at the end of an ordinary street, a sculptor keeps his living jewel: Suzette, his wife of eighteen months, who sings while his chisel rings next door.

The Coffee Pot

Normandy, autumn, a house so old that nothing in the guest room has moved since the Regency.

Krambambuli

In a Moravian tavern the gamekeeper Hopp trades twelve bottles of cherry brandy for a starved hunting dog of faultless build, marked on the brow with a white line that branches like a fir twig.

By the Sea

On a sun-struck Crimean shore, where consumptive patients come to breathe the sea air, the narrator falls in with a restless, coquettish young woman whom her own vanity will not let sit still for a moment.

Generous Wine

On the eve of a family wedding, an ailing old man is granted one night's freedom from his doctor's strict regime — and pours it, glass by glass, into a rebellion against age, illness and his own tenderness.

The Idiosyncrasies of a Young Blonde Woman

Wings

Yi Sang’s «Wings» (1936) is the most celebrated work of Korean modernism — a dizzying descent into the mind of a man who drifts, half-awake, through a cramped room he almost never leaves.