In "The Premature Burial", the first-person unnamed narrator describes his struggle with things such as "attacks of the singular disorder which physicians have agreed to term catalepsy", a condition where he randomly falls into a death-like trance.
The Duel by Joseph Conrad is Conrad's brilliantly ironic tale about two officers in Napoleon's Grand Army who, under a futile pretext, fought an on-going series of duels throughout the Napoleonic Wars.
The tale opens with the unnamed narrator arriving at the house of his friend, Roderick Usher, having received a letter from him in a distant part of the country complaining of an illness and asking for his comfort.
Set in late November 1827, the tale is begun by an unidentified narrator whose story is the loose outer frame for the central tale of Augustus Bedloe, a wealthy young invalid whom the narrator has known "casually" for eighteen years yet who still remains an enigma.
The story follows an unnamed narrator who visits a mental institution in southern France (more accurately, a "Maison de Sante") known for a revolutionary new method of treating mental illnesses called the "system of soothing".
"Ivan the Fool" (also known as "Ivan the Fool and his Two Brothers") is an 1886 short story (in fact, a literary fairy tale) by Leo Tolstoy, published in 1886.
An intense, psychologically charged domestic drama, The Return is a brilliant and haunting exploration of the insecurities that lie at the heart of human relationships.
The Red and the Black, Stendhal's masterpiece, is the story of Julien Sorel, a young dreamer from the provinces, fueled by Napoleonic ideals, whose desire to make his fortune sets in motion events both mesmerizing and tragic.
Prince Roman is a Pole who gives up his comfortable position in the aristocracy to fight as a (virtually) unknown soldier resisting Russian oppression.