A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Where does the story take place?
A colonel’s widow demands protection from a scandalous hotel guest, then learns one detail that changes her view.
A minor clerk bursts home ecstatic that his name has appeared in print, whatever the reason.
Lost in a winter city, a carpenter’s dog is rescued by a circus clown who sees in her the makings of a performer.
A grieving cabman carries strangers through the snowy city, searching among them for someone willing to hear about his son.
An eight-year-old starving on a Moscow street fixates on a restaurant sign and an unknown food called oysters.
A dressmaker’s daughter shops for trimmings while a devoted clerk warns that the student she loves may never treat her as an equal.
While Easter bells summon the city outside, an impoverished clerk spends another holiday night trapped in a smoky office.
A lawyer catches a beggar lying, offers him work, and assumes stern advice is enough to restore a life.
A Sunday animal market in Moscow becomes a crowded portrait of commerce, expertise, affection, and cruelty.
During Holy Week, an ailing bishop longs to meet his visiting mother as a son rather than as the distant office everyone sees.
Olenka can live only through someone else’s passions, adopting each beloved’s work, worries, and opinions as her own.
One accidental sneeze sends a timid clerk into an escalating panic over rank, manners, and official displeasure.
A society hostess dazzled by artistic celebrity overlooks the quiet distinction of the doctor she has married.
A vain provincial actor’s boast about a conquest turns dangerous when one listener knows the woman and demands satisfaction.
A practiced seducer meets a married woman at a seaside resort and discovers that their affair has become more serious than either expected.
While showing an architect a condemned tenement, a landlord recalls how one family’s ordinary poverty became a rapid descent.
On Christmas Eve, a resentful shoemaker meets a strange customer and gets a chance to trade poverty for wealth.
A young teacher wins the domestic happiness he imagined, only to find contentment raising questions about the life he has chosen.
Newly married to a wealthy older colonel, a young woman remains fixated on the indifferent friend she once hoped to marry.
On Christmas Eve, a nine-year-old apprentice writes home for rescue from hunger, beatings, and sleepless work in Moscow.
As invulnerable creatures overrun Earth, a scientist sends ninety-nine volunteers into the fourth dimension to strike at their source.
Psyche Zenobia climbs an Edinburgh steeple in search of material for a sensation article and puts her head through a clock face.
During the Roman siege of Jerusalem, three temple officials pay the soldiers below for animals to use in sacrifice.
A sick young man enters the Virginia mountains and returns with a precise memory of dying in another century.
