A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How quickly the story moves.
A mesmerist tests whether hypnosis can hold a dying man at the point between life and death.
A curious narrator searches for the secret behind a celebrated war hero whose perfect appearance seems too complete to be natural.
A convalescent observer follows an unreadable old man through London, convinced that his need for crowds hides a life of crime.
A prince walls his court inside a castellated abbey to outparty a plague — through seven colored rooms.
A curious passenger becomes obsessed with an artist's six-foot box and the strange marriage surrounding it on a voyage to New York.
Condemned by the Inquisition, a prisoner must understand each new torture before darkness, a hidden pit, and a descending blade kill him.
During a cholera outbreak, a nervous man sees a monstrous creature crawling down a distant hill.
A curious traveler visits a private asylum and joins an elegant dinner where every guest seems slightly out of place.
A town's most trusted man leads the hunt for a missing neighbor while every clue points to the victim's disgraced nephew.
On a train to Paris, a proudly controlling mother carries a caged bird home while unknowingly passing the wreckage of her daughter’s love.
A failing advance man hides beneath a hotel sheet while alcohol and drugs turn his last escape into a grotesque pursuit he cannot outrun.
In a snowbound military hut, a major’s seemingly casual questions expose the dangerous private anxieties beneath his authority.
After the thaw, a peasant brings his wife’s body down from the mountains—and the villagers reveal the grotesque ritual he performed while waiting.
In a rainy Italian hotel, an American wife goes after a stray cat and discovers how many other things she wants.
Two young friends race down an Alpine mountain, then linger over wine as marriage, school, and the end of freedom wait for them below.
While waiting for a train through Spain, a couple circles the life-changing decision neither can name directly.
In a Milan hospital after the fighting, wounded soldiers submit their bodies to machines while trying to imagine who they will be afterward.
A boy accompanies his doctor father across a dark lake to help a woman in labor, entering a night of pain, birth, and adult mystery.
A boy follows his jockey father through the racecourses of Italy and France, learning to love the horses, the crowds, and the man who rides them.
A young couple follows a drunken local guide out of Cortina for an illegal trout-fishing trip that keeps slipping further out of reach.
A veteran returns to his Oklahoma home after the war and finds that the town, his family, and the future they expect no longer fit him.
A boy’s holiday glow collapses when his father reveals that the girl he loves has chosen someone else.
A doctor’s claim to some driftwood is challenged by the lumberman who knows exactly where the logs came from.
On a moonlit fishing trip, Nick and Marjorie circle the quiet truth that their relationship has stopped being what it was.
