A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the story is told.
A bored baroness copies a window signal she sees across the street and discovers that curiosity can be taken as a business offer.
A respected lawyer accused of violating his lover’s grave refuses counsel and asks a shocked courtroom to hear why he returned to her.
An anticlerical village joiner wants a lucrative church contract, but the parish priest sets a spiritual price for the work.
A ferry passenger learns why an old friend’s marriage soured after his once-enchanting English bride became easier to understand.
A beautiful countess rebels against the husband who has used pregnancy to control her, choosing a revenge designed to poison his certainty.
Over whisky, a taxidermist boasts that preserving nature is only the beginning of his art—and explains how easily collectors can be fooled.
An art critic visits a missing painter's secret studio and learns why his monsters look more convincing than ordinary imagination can explain.
After a drunken fall, a salesman’s friends try to guide him back toward the church.
On the anniversary of Parnell’s death, campaign workers shelter from the rain and argue over Irish politics.
Two bungling kidnappers discover that their captive is far more trouble than the ransom is worth.
A hungry starship crew buys a hulking Martian animal, then learns its mind may be more civilized than their own.
A dying professor lends his brain to an experimental warship, and the machine begins making decisions its creators never authorized.
After eight years underground, three men risk the radioactive surface and find the robots fighting their war have kept a secret.
In a crime-free future, a pulp writer discovers that a perfect society has left him dangerously short of material.
Stranded on an asteroid with minutes of oxygen left, a patrolman and his camera-obsessed partner confront monsters that may exist only in the mind.
On a colonized, dying Mars, an exiled musician plays a tune that may summon a violent reckoning for Earth’s occupiers.
A freighter’s failed engine sends three incompatible crewmen out of the solar system with no ordinary route home.
An alien envoy announces Earth’s forced annexation and dares a military research team to overcome his perfect defenses.
Treasure hunters on a remote Pacific island discover that a Martian parasite can unite animals and people into one obedient mind.
Two starving space travelers search an abandoned alien warehouse for anything a human can safely eat.
A crew guarding Earth against telepathic invaders waits for a detector to reveal the first compromised mind.
Two stranded space travelers need fuel from a society whose idea of honorable warfare makes a simple recovery mission dangerous.
A student in a celebrated writing course objects to his professor’s rules for describing aliens and other planets.
