Undaunted by his setbacks with television, Stoppard had other irons in the fire. Three short stories appeared in 1964, the year Samuel Boot was rejected, as part of Faber and Faber's Introduction 2: Stories by New Writers. These short pieces are like nothing else in Stoppard's repertoire, though certain ideas will reoccur later. Stoppard has always been a self-cannibalizer, adapting and refining his thoughts. A hopeless, raw pain caused by an unyielding woman, moral questions about the responsibility of journalists, these themes will crop up in The Real Thing, Dirty Linen, and Night and Day. The second story even reflects the dejected ambition of a twenty-seven-year-old, unpublished, little known, and unlikely to be otherwise. Years later, in reply to a query about his habit of steering away from personal feeling, Stoppard replied smoothly (but feelingly?), “Well, I don't see any special virtue in making my private emotions the quarry for the statue I'm carving. I can do that kind of writing, but it tends to go off, like fruit. I don't like it very much even when it works … Let me put the best possible light on my inhibitions and say that I'm waiting until I can do it well.” Early in his career, in stories which could not expect a wide readership, Stoppard here lets his guard down.

The most haunting of the three stories, “Reunion”, is a mood piece in which an unnamed man and woman recover a moment's empathy, only to go separate ways. Its precise notation of external detail and the way one of the characters searches to express an inner confusion owe something to Hemingway, particularly to stories like “Cat in the Rain”.