If the narrator of tonight’s story were your conversation partner, you might not get in a word edgewise: Ring Lardner’s “Golden Honeymoon.”

Tonight’s high-spirited story features a confrontation between crime fiction’s two most extraordinary minds, Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.

Two wryly observed stories by a master storyteller, who said, “It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living”: Guy de Maupassant.

In “Poor Dear Margaret Kirby,” the significance of a devastating loss is realized only much later. A wise, insightful story by Kathleen Norris (1880-1966).

Sports writer, humorist, satirist, novelist, Ring Lardner was a versatile writer with the sharpest of ears for American vernacular speech. Here is one of his great stories, “Haircut.”

Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright (1859-1945) wrote under the pen name George Egerton. Here is a modern love story, written in the Victorian age.

An unforgettable story by the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Devious courtings, wryly observed by Grazia Deledda in “The Three Brothers.”

Tonight, by kind permission of the author, Max Willi Fischer’s recent prize-winning story, “The Odd Fellow.”

A rogue, not a villain. Enter Arsène: the very first story in the long and fabulous saga of Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin.