A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
An anticlerical village joiner wants a lucrative church contract, but the parish priest sets a spiritual price for the work.
A Paris officer recognizes a former colonial soldier whose chaotic courage and appetite once shaped life inside a blockaded town.
A bedridden tavern keeper’s furious wife finds an outrageous way to make him useful.
When an ostrich supposedly swallows a priceless diamond aboard ship, five ordinary birds become the stakes in an escalating auction.
A shipwreck survivor in a diving suit is mistaken for a god, but keeping up the role may cost him the treasure he came to recover.
A young builder finds a chest of silver beneath his fiancée’s garden and discovers that getting rich is harder than finding treasure.
A shabby barroom storyteller explains how he was promised a fortune by an unread author—and why he never received it.
A timid shopkeeper eats a strange mushroom after a domestic quarrel and returns home with a violent idea of merriment.
Caught in a storm, a genealogist takes shelter in an isolated New England farmhouse whose ancient owner studies a gruesome engraving.
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.
A Yukon camp's judge wakes alone in a boat with no food and no memory of how he got there.
After a drunken fall, a salesman’s friends try to guide him back toward the church.
On the anniversary of Parnell’s death, campaign workers shelter from the rain and argue over Irish politics.
A child is blamed when a treasured porcelain figure vanishes from a plantation home.
An artist wants to sketch a Cajun fisherman, but the man's daughter worries how strangers will portray him.
A farmer goes to a country ball to escape indecision about marriage and meets a woman with plans of her own.
A New Orleans agent visits a Louisiana plantation and grows close to a woman already engaged to a local painter.
With her brother sick and her father avoiding work, Lolotte takes a cotton delivery into her own hands.
With Christmas near, a plantation household searches in the rain for three missing turkeys.
Fifine takes her father's old fiddle to a plantation party, hoping it can help feed her family.
Hearing that his former love is struggling, Doudouce travels to see her and her family.
At a Cajun ball, a farmer watches the woman he loves draw the attention of a wealthy planter.
A new wife leaves her husband to find a life she can choose for herself.
