A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the story is told.
An exhausted French detachment facing a deadly winter march finds unexpected resolve after taking two civilians under its protection.
A chance encounter in a provincial tobacco shop revives a vanished world of river outings, hard work, and ingenious schemes.
When an ostrich supposedly swallows a priceless diamond aboard ship, five ordinary birds become the stakes in an escalating auction.
A stranger on a train recounts a second life in a future world, where love and private happiness stand against an approaching global war.
A stranded collector hatches an extinct giant bird on a lonely atoll and gains a companion that keeps growing.
An inventor descends five miles beneath the ocean in a steel sphere and finds that the abyss is neither empty nor lifeless.
A shipwreck survivor in a diving suit is mistaken for a god, but keeping up the role may cost him the treasure he came to recover.
A young builder finds a chest of silver beneath his fiancée’s garden and discovers that getting rich is harder than finding treasure.
A mild schoolmaster tests his courage with a harmless mock burglary and stumbles into a real criminal escape.
A village shop assistant returns from three missing weeks with ashes in his pockets and a love he cannot explain or forget.
A young schoolmaster receives a golden fruit said to grant perfect knowledge, just as he begins his respectable new career.
A neglected shopkeeper discovers that a crystal egg offers a living view of another world—and that its inhabitants may be watching back.
A ragged stranger claims to carry a fortune in man-made diamonds, but every proof of his success has made him look more like a criminal.
A successful politician confides that a green door has offered him glimpses of a lost garden of perfect happiness throughout his life.
A Brazilian gunboat sent against a plague of giant ants discovers an organized enemy capable of challenging human rule of the Amazon.
A colonial patrol trapped on a cliff must escape enemy fire, thirst, and a drop that seems impossible to survive.
A shabby barroom storyteller explains how he was promised a fortune by an unread author—and why he never received it.
A chemistry accident sends an ordinary schoolmaster into a shadow world that overlaps the lives of everyone he knew.
A London psychical researcher leaves his body during an experiment—and returns to find it occupied by something else.
A confident clubman claims he helped a hapless ghost vanish, then agrees to demonstrate the spirit’s strange hand gestures.
A poor medical student accepts an old philosopher’s inheritance offer and wakes to find that far more than a name has changed hands.
A mediocre painter watches his portrait acquire a devilish expression—and then hears the canvas criticize his art.
Over whisky, a taxidermist boasts that preserving nature is only the beginning of his art—and explains how easily collectors can be fooled.
A scholar links a dead professor's papers, a global cult, and a sailor's account to the same ancient being beneath the Pacific.
