Fario: 74 books

At a wedding party thrown for one of his wife's nieces, an older man is given permission to go off of his normally strict diet. Partaking too heavily of the food and wine, he becomes irascible and is rebuked in public by his wife and daughter. That night, in bed, in which, try as he might, he is unable...

The leathery and excessively slender chief of police don Blas Bustos y Mosquera has a handsome young nobleman, don Fernando, imprisoned for the crime of appearing before him with a fresh complexion and a cool demeanor. Don Fernando's fiancée comes to plead his case, but her beauty, which the...

Cavalry captain von Hecht is stationed in the small provincial town of M. His relationship with the lovely young wife of a fat merchant by the name of Starke provides him his only distraction. But von Hecht is already thirty-six, he has gotten over the romantic notions of his youth, and in his relationship...

In which the narrator recounts his experiences as a bag-boy at the neighborhood Albertsons. Genre: short story Words: 2,621

A slave, wet nurse to her mistress the queen's son, the crown prince, defends her charge from the dead king's bastard half brother, a vile would-be usurper, at great cost to herself.Genre: short taleWords: 2,030Date of translation: 2011

"Recollections of an Italian Gentleman" is a tale of a young man turned collaborator in a Rome occupied by French troops and then annexed to Napoleon's empire. The young collaborator recalls the events that marked these turbulent days, among them the abduction of the Pope by the French--His...

A high-school basketball game threatens to trigger a race riot in Caddo Parish, Louisiana.Genre: short storyWords: 2,525

"I desire a lot of women, almost all of them, really. It’s my way of hating them, because they give me reason to. They won’t have anything to do with me." In the séance that forms the backdrop to Italo Svevo's _The Broken Triangle_, a fantasy in one act, the spirit of the prematurely...

"Everyone felt his own beloved person threatened," notes the narrator of Svevo's sarcastic tale of a bungling murderer--an underemployed porter known derisively as "il signore" by his equally down-at-heel friends--on the loose in the city of Trieste. "L'assassinio di...

"Was briefly tempted to write today but then remembered that it was Sunday and that the last thing I wanted to be was a Sunday scribbler." Genre: diary Length: 3,700 words

In Panait Istrati's 1929 novella, now translated into English, fourteen-year-old Adrien Zograffi begins an apprenticeship in a toolmaking workshop on the docks of the Danube River port in Brăila, Romania. Progress, in the form of floating grain elevators, threatens to destroy the livelihoods of a large community of dockworkers. Genre: novella

"In Port-au-Prince, on the French side of the island of Santo Domingo, there lived, at the beginning of the century, when the blacks were killing the whites, a dreadful old Negro by the name of Congo Hoango."Genre: short story/novellaLength: 13,500 wordsTranslated from German by Juan LePuen

"José Matias," the tale of a madly romantic man of leisure who is going to his grave accompanied by a very brief procession of carriages, highlights the gentle irony—equal parts affection and sarcasm—that makes the work of the great nineteenth-century Portuguese writer José Maria de Eça de...

Failed composer Maestro Romão, ill, is seeking desperately to complete a piece of music he had abandoned in 1779, shortly after his marriage. In this brief and moving tale by the Brazilian master Machado de Assis, one of his finest, the frustrated artist Romão struggles momentarily against the oblivion...