A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
What would you like to read about?
At a Twelfth Night dinner, a guest asks how the household’s quiet companion came to live there and what her place has cost her.
In a quiet Paris garden, a young law student befriends two forgotten dancers who still inhabit the manners of another century.
Unable to sleep in an old family bedroom, a guest discovers secret love letters hidden beneath its severe former occupant’s portrait.
An aging bachelor revisits the one love he never declared and asks the question that could make his quiet life seem wasted.
Alone in the house of her whole life, an elderly woman writes to a friend about memory, aging, and the objects that preserve vanished lives.
A man with no obvious catastrophe explains why thirty years of repetition and one drawer of old letters have made life unbearable.
Letters hidden inside an old chasuble reveal a bedridden woman’s intimate meditation on the object that holds birth, love, illness, and death.
A racing tide traps an insurance inspector and an English family on a wreck, creating a New Year he never forgets.
A traveller pauses beside a dark reservoir and hears how two brothers faced a sudden, desperate accident there.
A chance meeting in a beer hall reveals why a once-privileged schoolmate has spent his adult life drinking at the same table.
A chance encounter in a provincial tobacco shop revives a vanished world of river outings, hard work, and ingenious schemes.
A successful politician confides that a green door has offered him glimpses of a lost garden of perfect happiness throughout his life.
Randolph Carter, cut off from the dream worlds of his youth, follows an inherited silver key toward his childhood home and a possible way back.
Gabriel Conroy attends his aunts’ annual dance, where an evening of music and conversation unsettles his assumptions.
With her husband away at war, a lonely young wife grows close to a visiting neighbor.
A boy shelters an injured wanderer while his Louisiana family faces losing the money for his schooling.
Pélagie saves for decades to rebuild the plantation house lost in the war, while her sister lives beside its ruins.
On her way to Mass, a girl stays with an elderly neighbor whom no one else can tend.
An elderly freed man keeps trying to reach the family that enslaved him decades earlier.
A traveler with a broken buggy is mistaken for a soldier who never came home for Christmas.
A struggling typist finds spring, memory, and a lost love hiding among the daily dishes on a restaurant menu.
A proud former Confederate officer is offended when an actor turns his old-fashioned manners and clothes into a theatrical sensation.
At Tokyo’s dazzling Rokumeikan ball in 1886, a seventeen-year-old Japanese woman dances for the first time with a visiting French naval officer.
A retired spaceman dying at home waits to hear one final launch while his family struggles with what his life in space meant to them.
