A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How quickly the story moves.
A guide takes a modern visitor through ancient Antioch, where a violent king prepares an animal costume for his latest public triumph.
An ambitious literary society secretary asks a famous editor to teach her the formula for a fashionable tale of extreme sensation.
A lost traveler follows an unusually beautiful lane to a cottage where every detail of the house and valley shows careful design.
A widower obsessed with his brilliant first wife brings a second bride into an abbey shaped by grief, opium, and dread.
A bored passenger on a future balloon tour writes a letter full of confident errors about the nineteenth century.
A dying skeptic submits to mesmerism and uses the trance to answer questions about God, matter, pain, and life after death.
A solemn student prankster tests a famous duelist’s pride with an insult designed to turn etiquette against him.
Toby Dammit's habit of betting the Devil his head becomes literal when a stranger accepts the wager at a covered bridge.
Seven men shut themselves inside a plague-stricken city and hold a desperate feast beside the body of their dead friend.
After saving a child from a Venetian canal, a mysterious man keeps a final appointment with the child's married mother.
Two reunited lovers discuss humanity's collapse and what one of them experienced as his body died, decayed, and lost its senses.
A perfectly ordered Dutch borough measures life by clocks and cabbages until a strange fiddler crosses the surrounding hills.
An heir uses an immense fortune to create a private landscape meant to surpass nature without losing its beauty.
A man answers a childhood friend’s urgent summons and enters a decaying estate where the house and its last family seem bound together.
A reclusive naturalist follows a cryptogram from a found parchment into the South Carolina woods in search of pirate treasure.
A condemned man argues that people are sometimes driven to do what they know will destroy them.
A solitary traveler watches a fairy circle a divided island as sunset turns the scene into a vision of aging and death.
A wealthy young man rejects status and politics to treat landscape gardening as an art and a plan for a happy life.
A barber's son explains how plagiarism, paid praise, personal attacks, and business deals made him a national literary authority.
When two women are brutally killed in a locked Paris room, Dupin tests the evidence that the police dismiss.
Two newly immortal spirits cross the stars while one explains how every word and action continues to shape the universe.
A man with catalepsy becomes consumed by the fear that one of his trances will be mistaken for death.
A stolen royal letter remains inside a minister's home despite months of secret police searches, and Dupin asks what they failed to see.
A vain young heir falls for a woman he can barely see and rushes toward marriage before he understands who she is.
