A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How quickly the story moves.
An orphan crosses the country and comes back to the town where his mother is buried.
A man wanders a desolate plain looking for the city of Carcosa and finds signs he cannot explain.
A man hears a familiar tapping in a room where no one else can be.
A shepherd meets a radiant stranger who vanishes whenever he questions her.
A rancher claims he killed his Chinese worker over a simple task, but a local witness tells another story.
Alone in a deserted mining camp, Hiram Beeson waits each night for a visitor from beneath his floor.
An orphan girl races through an approaching storm to find a kindly cobbler who can free her brother from a hollow tree.
Nine years after a joyful summer confession, a wealthy woman measures the life she let class and hesitation decide for her.
A married woman tries to end a friend’s pursuit, only to discover that her principles are less secure than his attention makes them seem.
A comfortable reformer judges a village priest unfit for service, then learns what hunger looks like when pride tries to hide it.
A writer tends a wounded widower beside his wife’s coffin and listens as he tries to explain a despair he cannot explain to himself.
A failed hunting trip brings a ruined prince to the edge of an estate owned by the wealthy woman he once refused to marry.
A wealthy factory owner spends Christmas confronting the distance between her good intentions, her workers, and the life she longs to lead.
A retired lieutenant spends a sweltering day condemning the town’s idle natives while his own hours slip away.
A married young woman crosses the river at night to meet an idle village watchman, knowing the morning will demand an answer.
An idle landscape painter befriends two sisters and finds love complicated by a fierce argument over art, work, and social duty.
On a Black Sea steamer, a disillusioned landowner recounts how his worship of a beautiful neighbor drew him across Europe.
Returning to her family estate, a young heiress finds the freedom of the steppe at odds with the narrow life waiting for her at home.
Five children turn a forbidden late-night game of loto into a small world of greed, vanity, kindness, quarrels, and sudden sleep.
On Easter night, a ferry monk mourns the gentle hymn writer whose words the celebrating monastery never learned to value.
A gravely ill soldier sails home from the Far East, sustained by memories of snow, family, and a village impossibly far away.
Beneath the stars of the steppe, shepherds and an overseer trade legends of treasure and wonder what happiness might be.
A seasoned prosecutor discovers that reasoning with his seven-year-old son is harder than addressing any court.
A wealthy village family's corrupt business and private rivalries draw a poor young bride into a struggle over money, conscience, and power.
