A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the story is told.
A boastful young lover challenges a lawyer to argue him out of marriage—and discovers how quickly conviction can yield to eloquence.
A chorus girl opens her door to her lover’s desperate wife and is made to answer for money she never received and choices she did not make.
As a child lies gravely ill, his mother and longtime doctor confront a question that has festered between them for years.
An accomplished engineer complains that the public knows performers and criminals better than builders and scholars—until his seatmate tests the claim.
A laboring woman meets the husband who rarely comes home and asks him to stay, if only for a day.
A vain provincial actor’s boast about a conquest turns dangerous when one listener knows the woman and demands satisfaction.
On Easter Eve, a worried deacon asks a learned priest to condemn his wayward son in a letter neither man can truly own.
A bailiff meets an old shepherd in a rain-soaked wood, where a dwindling natural world gives voice to their own despair.
A guide takes a modern visitor through ancient Antioch, where a violent king prepares an animal costume for his latest public triumph.
An ambitious literary society secretary asks a famous editor to teach her the formula for a fashionable tale of extreme sensation.
A dying skeptic submits to mesmerism and uses the trance to answer questions about God, matter, pain, and life after death.
A group of confident American scholars revives an Egyptian mummy and discovers that he has a low opinion of modern progress.
Two reunited lovers discuss humanity's collapse and what one of them experienced as his body died, decayed, and lost its senses.
Two souls meet after Earth’s destruction, and one explains how a newly discovered comet ended the human world.
Two newly immortal spirits cross the stars while one explains how every word and action continues to shape the universe.
A stolen royal letter remains inside a minister's home despite months of secret police searches, and Dupin asks what they failed to see.
A failing advance man hides beneath a hotel sheet while alcohol and drugs turn his last escape into a grotesque pursuit he cannot outrun.
In a snowbound military hut, a major’s seemingly casual questions expose the dangerous private anxieties beneath his authority.
Two young friends race down an Alpine mountain, then linger over wine as marriage, school, and the end of freedom wait for them below.
A veteran boxer plans to lose the fight that will end his career—but keeping the money may demand one last act of courage.
While waiting for a train through Spain, a couple circles the life-changing decision neither can name directly.
A wounded lieutenant keeps vigil against sleep, replaying memory, prayer, and imagined trout streams to hold his soul together after the war.
A young couple follows a drunken local guide out of Cortina for an illegal trout-fishing trip that keeps slipping further out of reach.
After being thrown from a freight train, Nick Adams finds food and company beside a campfire—but the prizefighter waiting there is not safe.
