A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Recurring elements in the story’s premise.
An orphan crosses the country and comes back to the town where his mother is buried.
A Union soldier returns to the Tennessee home he left after a bitter family split.
Lost in a winter city, a carpenter’s dog is rescued by a circus clown who sees in her the makings of a performer.
Returning to his changed hometown, an aging architect confronts the cost of a divorce he once left others to arrange.
Three friends invent time travel, claim prehistoric America as a nation, and discover that founding a country is harder than reaching the past.
After four years at sea, a sailor returns to Marseille and meets a woman whose questions turn a night of celebration into dread.
A wealthy, childless couple offers two poor farming families money and security in exchange for adopting a son.
A kindhearted coachman adopts an unwanted dog, but her devotion and unruly habits bring him to an impossible choice.
A poor family builds its hopes around an absent uncle’s promised fortune during a long-awaited holiday to Jersey.
A stranger’s watchful presence unsettles a fisherman’s household until his identity forces the family to reconsider every bond within it.
A penniless London dreamer searches night after night for Celephaïs, the timeless city he first entered in childhood.
A lonely man escapes the lightless castle where he has always lived and searches for other people under the full moon.
A boy shelters an injured wanderer while his Louisiana family faces losing the money for his schooling.
A long-haul spacer returns to Earth to meet his newborn son, drunk, broke, and unsure whether he can stop choosing space over his family.
A defeated space fleet returns to peaceful Earth for fuel and turns a willing welcome into occupation, forced labor, and revolt.
15 stories
