A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the story is told.
On a cold Good Friday evening, a theology student tells two widows a Gospel story and is startled by their response.
At a crowded monastery, a traveller shares a room with a young convert whose restless search for learning has left him without a home.
A boy discovers his governess’s secret romance and learns how much power a whispered threat can hold.
A Norwegian fisherman explains how careful observation saved him when a hurricane swept his boat into the Maelström.
A sick young man enters the Virginia mountains and returns with a precise memory of dying in another century.
A demon describes a solitary man who endures a violent, unnatural landscape until the world around him becomes completely still.
Two souls meet after Earth’s destruction, and one explains how a newly discovered comet ended the human world.
A wounded traveler finds a portrait so lifelike that he searches a book for the story of the woman it depicts.
Scheherazade tells one more Sinbad voyage, but the king finds modern science and technology less believable than magic.
A skeptical country doctor recalls the Christmas night when fear, faith, and illness combined to produce what others called a miracle.
In a Corsican mountain pass, a traveller hears how a timid orphan became the island’s most feared outlaw.
A self-styled naïve bachelor warns husbands after a lover's drunken confession unsettles his ideas about courtship.
In court, a wife's plea for divorce reveals a husband whose worship of ideal beauty has become a fevered obsession.
A traveler in the Auvergne keeps meeting a solitary old woman whose grief finally breaks through her reserve.
A young joiner on trial for a double murder rejects an insanity defense and demands judgment on his own account.
A respected man returns to a Breton inn and confronts the human cost of a long-forgotten encounter.
A landowner recalls forcing his pregnant servant into a marriage arranged to protect his own name.
An old woman explains why a ring of a child’s blond hair has made her consider herself a widow all her life.
A visitor to an asylum reads the journal of a collector whose antique cabinet concealed a relic that consumed his mind and desire.
When a grandmother asks a gentle priest why he chose solitude, he recalls the childhood attachment that taught him to fear ordinary happiness.
A French settler in colonial Algeria recalls the restless woman whose freedom never fit the life he tried to give her.
An old marquis confesses why one visit to a dead woman’s locked bedroom left him afraid of darkness for life.
A doctor explains how a married woman, a dead lover, and an imminent homecoming demanded instant deception.
A schoolboy's joke links a lonely Latin master with a laundress and gives a lesson no classical text can provide.
