Tonight, from Canada, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s gently humorous story, “Akin to Love.”

A beautifully observed and crafted early story by Nobel Prize-winning Italian author Grazia Deledda.

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.”