A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
A dying man escapes waking life's monotony through dreams of enchanted gardens and a bronze gate said to open onto a final realm.
A solitary bank clerk forms an unexpected friendship with a married woman and must decide how close to let her come.
A boy promises to bring a gift from a bazaar to the girl he adores, and waits for his chance to go.
Eveline must decide whether to leave her family and sail away with the man she hopes to marry.
Gabriel Conroy attends his aunts’ annual dance, where an evening of music and conversation unsettles his assumptions.
A boy waits for news of an ailing priest and struggles to understand the adults’ uneasy silences.
Two Dublin men arrange a meeting with a servant, and one spends the evening waiting for news.
On Easter morning, three children take flowers from a recluse's hill, drawing him back toward the village.
A woman who has feared crossing the bayou since childhood must help a boy hurt on her side of it.
A young mother at a Louisiana plantation sees her husband's love vanish as rumors spread about their baby.
Pélagie saves for decades to rebuild the plantation house lost in the war, while her sister lives beside its ruins.
After hearing that her husband has died, a woman discovers an unexpected feeling while she sits alone.
In a future that has abolished fear, graveyards, and the literature of horror, the last man from the dead rises to make the world afraid again.
Seekers from several species travel to a machine that knows everything, only to learn that knowledge depends on asking a valid question.
A voice in a psychology instructor’s mind guides him toward a way of seeing that strips ordinary reality of meaning.
A long-haul spacer returns to Earth to meet his newborn son, drunk, broke, and unsure whether he can stop choosing space over his family.
A defeated space fleet returns to peaceful Earth for fuel and turns a willing welcome into occupation, forced labor, and revolt.
