A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Recurring elements in the story’s premise.
A stranger at a desert campfire tells how four prospectors were trapped in a cave thirty years earlier.
An orphan girl races through an approaching storm to find a kindly cobbler who can free her brother from a hollow tree.
A tipsy bridegroom regales a railway compartment with his philosophy of happiness while searching for the coach where his new wife waits.
An eloquent abbot leaves his desert monastery to condemn the city’s sins, then discovers how seductive a warning can become.
Escorted through autumn mud, a nameless tramp describes the free Siberian life he hopes awaits him beyond prison.
On Easter night, a ferry monk mourns the gentle hymn writer whose words the celebrating monastery never learned to value.
Two tipsy lawyers take a wrong turn after a long walk from the station and break into the wrong country cottage.
A gravely ill soldier sails home from the Far East, sustained by memories of snow, family, and a village impossibly far away.
A ticket inspector vows to reform, but each attempt to perform his duty only makes a sick passenger’s night worse.
Snowbound at a roadside tavern on Christmas Eve, a young landowner hears how a ruined idealist’s convictions consumed his life.
A frightened surveyor invents a fearsome reputation to protect himself on a night journey—and makes his driver even more afraid.
Driving his gravely ill wife through a blizzard, a drunken turner discovers remorse only when time is almost gone.
A cattle merchant crosses Russia by freight train, paying at every stop while schedules, regulations, and neglect consume his profit.
A cheerful student rides the night mail and discovers that another man’s adventure can be a lifetime of cold, danger, and resentment.
On the long road back to her village school, an exhausted teacher confronts the life that work and isolation have reduced to routine.
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 pilot risks a solo flight to Mars, where a hidden survivor and a silent alien intelligence reveal why Earth’s missions never came home.
Three friends invent time travel, claim prehistoric America as a nation, and discover that founding a country is harder than reaching the past.
A Norwegian fisherman explains how careful observation saved him when a hurricane swept his boat into the Maelström.
A lost traveler follows an unusually beautiful lane to a cottage where every detail of the house and valley shows careful design.
After a storm destroys his ship, a skeptical traveler finds himself aboard an ancient vessel racing toward the South Pole.
A bored passenger on a future balloon tour writes a letter full of confident errors about the nineteenth century.
An heir uses an immense fortune to create a private landscape meant to surpass nature without losing its beauty.
Scheherazade tells one more Sinbad voyage, but the king finds modern science and technology less believable than magic.
