A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How quickly the story moves.
Scheherazade tells one more Sinbad voyage, but the king finds modern science and technology less believable than magic.
A young couple uses two sailors' conflicting dates to satisfy an uncle's impossible demand that three Sundays fall in one week.
A journalist reports that an obscure chemist has found a way to turn lead into pure gold.
A disgraced man recounts how a namesake who looked and acted like him kept appearing whenever he was about to cross a moral line.
Nick Adams walks away from a burned town into the Michigan wilderness, building a camp and fishing the river one careful act at a time.
A young Harvard poet and his older bride cross the Atlantic determined to begin a perfect marriage, but Europe has other distractions.
A wounded lieutenant keeps vigil against sleep, replaying memory, prayer, and imagined trout streams to hold his soul together after the war.
As an autumn storm lashes Michigan, Nick Adams and Bill drink by the fire and talk around the breakup Nick cannot quite explain.
When a timid civil servant’s elderly mother is declared dead, grief soon competes with inheritance, office protocol, and his wife’s practical schemes.
A traveler in the Auvergne keeps meeting a solitary old woman whose grief finally breaks through her reserve.
A nostalgic former clerk recalls the sunny Sunday walk when helping a lost couple led him far from his map and his innocence.
A road trip through Normandy leads to a chapel keeper who sells homemade saints and measures his drunkenness by degrees.
A narrator studying a famously irresistible man finds the strongest clue to his charm in a woman’s portrait at home.
A sharp-tongued rail traveler records the sights, absurdities, and unsettling stories encountered along the French Riviera.
A French settler in colonial Algeria recalls the restless woman whose freedom never fit the life he tried to give her.
Two hungry strangers sharing a slow train along the Mediterranean coast discover an unusual way to ease each other’s need.
A dazzling Mediterranean boat ride turns from news of disaster to a friend’s indecorous tale about snow.
Ten travelers flee occupied Rouen, but their escape stalls when a Prussian officer makes one passenger’s body the price of everyone’s freedom.
Two lovers exchange letters over whether physical desire corrupts love or completes it.
A naval officer recalls an Indian expedition where a prince’s troubling gift binds him to a child trapped by courtly power.
A fashionable niece condemns modern manners, and her older aunt answers with a sharper lesson in observation.
A learned provincial doctor finds a manuscript that seems to settle the mystery of the soul—and lets one doctrine consume his reason and household.
A man who believes himself untouched by age meets the woman he once adored and sees twelve lost years all at once.
A midnight train encounter leads two travelers through unsettling accounts of the dread inspired by things not yet understood.
