A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the story is told.
A teacher terrified of disorder hides behind rules and routines, until a lively woman and her defiant brother disturb his sealed existence.
On Christmas Eve, a resentful shoemaker meets a strange customer and gets a chance to trade poverty for wealth.
A Latin teacher decides to train a kitten as he trains pupils, with lessons that teach fear more effectively than skill.
Two drunken sailors enter a plague-sealed London district and interrupt a grotesque court meeting in an undertaker’s shop.
Seven men shut themselves inside a plague-stricken city and hold a desperate feast beside the body of their dead friend.
A demon describes a solitary man who endures a violent, unnatural landscape until the world around him becomes completely still.
A perfectly ordered Dutch borough measures life by clocks and cabbages until a strange fiddler crosses the surrounding hills.
A prince walls his court inside a castellated abbey to outparty a plague — through seven colored rooms.
In a garden cluttered with bathtubs and boot jacks, a very busy God tries to keep order.
In a fashionable Paris salon, the privilege of cutting a brioche marks favor, rivalry, and the changing fortunes of its celebrated hostess.
At the Last Judgment, tyrants, saints, and ordinary souls learn that divine scrutiny exposes more than public sins.
A young schoolmaster receives a golden fruit said to grant perfect knowledge, just as he begins his respectable new career.
A young man forbidden to risk his finest clothes chooses one moonlit night to wear them freely and embrace the world beyond his home.
A sighted mountaineer falls into an isolated valley where blindness is universal—and learns that his advantage has no accepted meaning.
An abused laborer in a roaring power station begins to worship the largest dynamo as a god capable of judging his brutal supervisor.
A grieving prince builds an ever more magnificent monument to his lost queen, refining it until devotion and art become hard to separate.
A dying man escapes waking life's monotony through dreams of enchanted gardens and a bronze gate said to open onto a final realm.
A young singer crosses many lands searching for the beautiful city he remembers, hoping to find people who understand his songs.
A lonely lighthouse keeper boards a white ship under the full moon and sails through dreamlike lands of beauty, mystery, and danger.
A Terran boy visits his alien friends on the day their people finally begin winning back a century of conquered worlds.
In a future that has abolished fear, graveyards, and the literature of horror, the last man from the dead rises to make the world afraid again.
On the eve of humanity’s first Moon rocket, the man who owns the launch company tries to stop a breakthrough he believes civilization is not ready to use.
Seekers from several species travel to a machine that knows everything, only to learn that knowledge depends on asking a valid question.
Three shape-changing aliens land on Earth to open an invasion route, but the planet offers forms their rigid caste system forbids.
