Summary:

The dog Kashtanka belongs to a drunken carpenter who takes her out one day, but on the way home loses her in the confusion of a military parade. The story is told by an omniscient narrator who privileges Kashtanka's point of view, so we follow the dog's subsequent adventures largely from her eyes.

After spending a frightening night in the street, Kashtanka is rescued by a kind man who feeds her and takes her into his home, which turns out to be a strange menagerie. The rescuer happens to run a traveling animal show, in which the star performers are a goose named Ivan Ivanitch and a cat by the name of Fyodor Timofeyitch. Kashtanka's new master renames her "Auntie" and sets about training her to perform in his act.

"Auntie" thoroughly enjoys her new surroundings. Her master is kind, there is plenty of food and love; and "Auntie" gets along well with the other animals. However, one day the carpenter and his son attend the show and see "Auntie" performing. They instantly recognize her and call out, "Kashtanka!" Kashtanka drops her "Auntie" persona and follows them home, as the pleasures of her interlude with her new master rapidly fade from memory.

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Summary:

To whom shall I tell my grief? Grief must be shared. The son of Iona Potapov, an old cabman, has died. He sits lost in his thoughts, mourning his son. He tries to share his feelings (or at least to tell his story) with each of the people who engage his cab. Iona says to each of them, "My son died last week."

The first passenger responds by asking, "What did he die of?" Iona tells a second group of passengers, "This week my son died." They give him a flip response, "We shall all die." Again, this trivializes his story and his feelings. No one listens. No one is willing to make contact with him. When he tells one of his colleagues at the yard, "but my son is dead," the person doesn't even bother to answer.

Iona "thirsts for speech." He needs to occupy his mind, to share his anguish, to avoid the silence in which he imagines his son. "To talk about him with someone is possible, but to think of him and picture him is insufferable anguish . . ." In the end Iona is reduced to experiencing some relief in the warm, animal companionship of his horse. As he tells his sad story to the mare, she "breathes on her master's hands."

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Summary:

May-Alice Culhane (Mary McDonnell) is a daytime soap opera star who is struck by a taxi in New York and wakes up in a hospital paralyzed from the waist down. Upset and bitter, and unable to continue acting, which she says is the only thing she was ever good at, she returns to her Louisiana bayou family home to begin the rest of her life in isolation.

An employment agency sends out a string of helpers. Some are better than others, but all are quickly defeated by May-Alice’s deep bitterness and negativity and her incipient alcoholism. Then comes Chantelle (Alfre Woodard), who needs the job so badly, as part of digging herself out from a cocaine addiction, that her determination makes her a match for May-Alice.

It is decidedly bumpy going, but Chantelle persists and May-Alice finally strops drinking and begins to make some progress in physical therapy. She takes up black-and-white photography, developing her own prints from her wheelchair, and she gratefully receives the gentlemanly attentions of her high school idol Rennie, played by David Strathairn. (The film takes its title from a practice that locals believe can make love-wishes come true.)

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Summary:

Dmitri Dmitrich Gurov is lolling around on the beach at Yalta when he spies a lovely young woman with a Pomeranian dog. Gurov is a family man, nearly 40 years old, but his wife and children are home in Moscow, and he regularly dabbles in extramarital affairs. Thus, he sets out to make a conquest of Anna Sergeyevna, whose husband, it turns out, is a "good, honest man, " but a "flunkey" in the provincial town where they live.

They succumb to their passion and become lovers, but after a few weeks, Anna is called home, and Dmitri also returns home. Surprisingly, he cannot forget her. He is tortured by a desire to see her again, eventually arranging a trip to her hometown, where he encounters his lover at the opera. They fall into one another's arms again.

Anna Sergeyevna then begins to visit Moscow every few months so they can spend a few hours in a hotel room together. Their love has grown into tenderness: "They forgave each other for what they were ashamed of in the past, they forgave everything in the present . . . " In the end they decide to make a plan to remain together, realizing that "the most complicated and difficult" part of their road is just beginning.

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Summary:

The story begins with Vera's arrival at her grandfather's estate on the steppe. The young woman has finished school, her father is dead, and now she must make a life for herself. The estate brings back pleasant memories of childhood, but country life is so boring! Vera would like to do something important with her life--become a doctor, or judge, or mechanic--but she feels paralyzed.

Neshtchapov, the local doctor, is a polished, handsome man, who has gone into management, although he still practices medicine. Certainly the most eligible bachelor in the region, the doctor falls in love with Vera, but she finds him vacuous and his conversation utterly boring. Vera sinks into irritability and depression, which culminates in an irrational outburst against her frightened maid. After this, she decides to take control of her life--by marrying Neshtchapov.

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Summary:

In Siberia, "Old Semyon, nicknamed Canny, and a young Tatar, whom no one knew by name, were sitting on the riverbank by the campfire;the other three ferrymen were in the hut." (p. 97) The Tatar is horrified by the prospect of exile, having left a beautiful wife behind. But Semyon counsels acceptance "You will get used to it," he repeats again and again.

Semyon tells him the story of Vasily Sergeyitch, a wealthy aristocrat who was sent into exile 15 years earlier. He was able to send for his wife and daughter. The wife agreed to come, but then ran away with a lover, and now the daughter who has spent her life in exile with him lies dying of consumption. The point of this story seems to be that the exiled man should accept his fate and forego desire, or the expectation of happiness.

Later, Vasily Sergeyitch hails the ferry to take him across the river. He is hastening to town to see a new doctor, whom he desperately hopes might help his daughter. Old Semyon mocks him: "Looking for a good doctor is like chasing the wind in the fields or catching the devil by the tail." (p. 111) As the ferrymen try to sleep in the cold, windy hut, they hear the Tatar outside crying, and Semyon repeats, "He'll get used to it."

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Summary:

Lieutenant General von Rabbek hosts a party for members of the regiment in his magnificent home. Of all the attendees, the most awkward is Ryabovitch, "a little officer in spectacles, with sloping shoulders and whiskers like a lynx's." He considers himself the shyest, most undistinguished officer in the whole brigade. While wondering through the mansion, trying to avoid talking to people, he stumbles into a dark room, whereupon a woman rushes up to him, whispering, "At last!" She throws her arms around his neck and kisses him. At once, however, she realizes her mistake, runs from the room, and is lost in the crowd.

Ryabovitch's passion awakes! He feels that his life is beginning anew. For the rest of the evening, he searches in vain for the woman who kissed him. The next day his regiment departs for another area, but some time later, when he returns to the same town, Ryabovitch continues his obsession with the kiss he experienced that night, and still hopes to discover who the woman in the dark room was.

If only he could communicate with General von Rabbek--but no, Rabbek doesn't respond. In the end he stands on the riverbank: "Now that he expected nothing, the incident of the kiss, his impatience, his vague hopes and disappointment, presented themselves in a clear light . . . And the whole world, the whole of life, seemed to Ryabovitch an unintelligible, aimless jest . . . "

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Summary:

This is the story of the life, loves, wounds, grit, artistic genius, and death of the well-known Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, played by Salma Hayek. At the age of eighteen Kahlo was in a near-fatal bus accident that left her with lifelong injuries to her pelvis, spine, and uterus. (The film does not include the fact that Kahlo had suffered some physical disability since a case of polio at the age of six.)

The life Kahlo survived to live was artistically enormously productive and successful, but it also had more than the usual share of physical suffering, medical procedures, attempts to self-medicate, and accompanying emotional distress. The film covers these things, as well as what Kahlo called the second disaster in her life, her marriage to the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, played by Alfred Molina.

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Summary:

Penny (Michele Hicks), working as a prostitute, is called to a room in a seedy hotel where she finds her client is a pair of adult conjoined twins, Blake and Francis Falls (played by identical but not conjoined twins, Mark and Michael Polish, who also co-wrote the screenplay). Shocked, she flees but later returns and, when she learns that one of the twins is ill, calls a doctor friend of hers to examine them. She cares for the twins and they become friends. At Halloween, "the only night of the year they [can pass for] normal," she takes them to a party and then back to her apartment where she and Blake almost make love while Francis, evidently the weaker twin, is sleeping.

She tells her lawyer/pimp about the twins, and he tries to persuade them to sell him their story (which he imagines in terms of separation: "The greatest divorce of all time: not who gets the kid but who gets the kidney . . . "). Offended by her betrayal, they return to their hotel room, and, apparently for the first time, the twins fight. Blake wants to get away from his brother.

The next morning Francis is ill once more, and the twins are hospitalized. Michele visits them and learns that they are dying. Francis's heart is becoming weaker, straining Blake's, and the only way to save Blake will be by separating them. Francis cannot survive separation. Penny tracks down their mother (Lesley Ann Warren), who gave them up for adoption at birth. She visits them in hospital. It emerges that Penny herself has a "retarded" child who is being raised by others. Francis's heart fails, and the twins are taken to the operating room.

Later, Penny tracks Blake down where he is now living alone in the trailer where the twins had lived before, as circus performers. The film ends with Blake, now a man with one arm and one functioning leg, telling Penny that the "story of me is over," but also that stories continue after sad endings. What makes an ending sad, he tells her, is the knowledge that the storyteller is continuing without you.

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Summary:

Mickey, widowed but one year, and his young son, Duncan, drive East from their home in Wyoming, to vacation with Mickey's family on the Jersey shore. As the story develops, the reader learns that Carol, who died from ovarian cancer, was a westerner, and that Mickey is being tempted to return to the east coast with Duncan and reestablish life there.

The two arrive at the vacation cottage very early in the morning; Mickey needs to be with the ocean and what it means to him; Duncan, who has never seen an ocean, rushes to the experience. The child becomes fearful, as he looks at the vast expanse, calls up the idea of sharks, asks if his Mom waits at the "topic" of Cancer for them. The tension develops when Mickey chooses to swim to assuage his own grief, not realizing that his venture terrifies Duncan. The reunion of father and son points to a new understanding of what it means and will mean to each to go forward without Carol.

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