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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.
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.
When two women are brutally killed in a locked Paris room, Dupin tests the evidence that the police dismiss.
A curious passenger becomes obsessed with an artist's six-foot box and the strange marriage surrounding it on a voyage to New York.
A wounded traveler finds a portrait so lifelike that he searches a book for the story of the woman it depicts.
Condemned by the Inquisition, a prisoner must understand each new torture before darkness, a hidden pit, and a descending blade kill him.
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.
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 murderer explains how he killed an old man, then hears a sound that destroys his confidence when police arrive.
Scheherazade tells one more Sinbad voyage, but the king finds modern science and technology less believable than magic.
A town's most trusted man leads the hunt for a missing neighbor while every clue points to the victim's disgraced nephew.
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 newly made Irish baronet competes with a French neighbor for a widow and mistakes every sign for proof that she favors him.
A disgraced man recounts how a namesake who looked and acted like him kept appearing whenever he was about to cross a moral line.
