A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The readership the story was written for.
Seven-year-old Pashka is left overnight at a rural hospital, where promised treats give way to a world he cannot understand.
A gravely ill schoolmaster insists on attending the annual dinner that celebrates his pupils, determined to reject every hint of weakness.
On the long road back to her village school, an exhausted teacher confronts the life that work and isolation have reduced to routine.
On Christmas Eve, a resentful shoemaker meets a strange customer and gets a chance to trade poverty for wealth.
On a cold Good Friday evening, a theology student tells two widows a Gospel story and is startled by their response.
A vanished rake, a locked room, and one foreign match send two investigators racing toward an elaborate murder theory.
A young teacher wins the domestic happiness he imagined, only to find contentment raising questions about the life he has chosen.
In a shuttered provincial house, a mother and daughter sew endlessly for a marriage that remains only a hope.
Newly married to a wealthy older colonel, a young woman remains fixated on the indifferent friend she once hoped to marry.
A jealous sexton blames his wife for every storm that sends a young traveler to their isolated hut.
Two impoverished hunters, unable to reclaim a pawned gun, walk to the spring woods to see whether the snipe have arrived.
A fever overtakes a young lieutenant on the train home, distorting every sound, face, and passing hour.
At a crowded monastery, a traveller shares a room with a young convert whose restless search for learning has left him without a home.
On Christmas Eve, a nine-year-old apprentice writes home for rescue from hunger, beatings, and sleepless work in Moscow.
On his last night in the country, a young statistician walks into the moonlit mist with his host’s daughter and an unexpected confession.
A Latin teacher decides to train a kitten as he trains pupils, with lessons that teach fear more effectively than skill.
A boy discovers his governess’s secret romance and learns how much power a whispered threat can hold.
Prescribed total rest in a nursery with barred windows, a young wife begins to study the wallpaper.
As invulnerable creatures overrun Earth, a scientist sends ninety-nine volunteers into the fourth dimension to strike at their source.
A pilot risks a solo flight to Mars, where a hidden survivor and a silent alien intelligence reveal why Earth’s missions never came home.
A timid traveler is mistaken for a space-polo expert, then forced into a deadly match with his ship and reputation at stake.
A mild bookkeeper’s quiet tour of the Solar System turns him into an asteroid-town marshal with an alien beast for backup.
Three friends invent time travel, claim prehistoric America as a nation, and discover that founding a country is harder than reaching the past.
After nearly six thousand years of immortality, a man who wants to die attempts a radical cure: rebuilding the world of his childhood.
