A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
A ragged stranger claims to carry a fortune in man-made diamonds, but every proof of his success has made him look more like a criminal.
A colonial patrol trapped on a cliff must escape enemy fire, thirst, and a drop that seems impossible to survive.
A professional burglar poses as a landscape painter, only to find that art criticism is the least predictable hazard of the job.
A housemaid watches her respectable fiancé rise in the world—and begin to treat their long engagement as something beneath him.
A shabby barroom storyteller explains how he was promised a fortune by an unread author—and why he never received it.
A stubborn skeptic discovers that any command he truly wills becomes real, though precision is not among his gifts.
A physiologist’s new stimulant speeds thought and movement so radically that the outside world seems frozen in time.
A timid shopkeeper eats a strange mushroom after a domestic quarrel and returns home with a violent idea of merriment.
A confident clubman claims he helped a hapless ghost vanish, then agrees to demonstrate the spirit’s strange hand gestures.
A mediocre painter watches his portrait acquire a devilish expression—and then hears the canvas criticize his art.
Over whisky, a taxidermist boasts that preserving nature is only the beginning of his art—and explains how easily collectors can be fooled.
An obese clubman demands an old family remedy for losing weight, only to discover how literally the recipe works.
A self-proclaimed 228-year-old gentleman recalls evenings with Samuel Johnson, Boswell, and their sharp-tongued London circle.
A struggling writer befriends a reclusive doctor who can survive only in a refrigerated room, then learns why the cold is essential.
An art critic visits a missing painter's secret studio and learns why his monsters look more convincing than ordinary imagination can explain.
A Wall Street copyist answers every request with "I would prefer not to" — and never leaves.
A woman in a remote Klondike cabin waits for Dave Walsh, and a visitor's guide knows why he has not come.
Two Klondike partners buy a handsome sled dog who refuses to pull and keeps finding them whenever they leave him behind.
With Christmas near, a plantation household searches in the rain for three missing turkeys.
A shopkeeper spends his earnings on his sister's hopes of becoming an opera singer.
A town speculates about whom an awkward young woman will marry.
A traveling journalist arrives in supposedly uneventful Nashville and discovers that its quiet streets conceal tangled loyalties and danger.
A celebrated safecracker tries to build an honest life under a new name, but his old skills are not finished with him.
Two young artists quietly sacrifice for each other when money runs out and their shared creative life is threatened.
