A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The narrator’s attitude toward the story.
A laboring woman meets the husband who rarely comes home and asks him to stay, if only for a day.
A bailiff meets an old shepherd in a rain-soaked wood, where a dwindling natural world gives voice to their own despair.
On the long road back to her village school, an exhausted teacher confronts the life that work and isolation have reduced to routine.
On a cold Good Friday evening, a theology student tells two widows a Gospel story and is startled by their response.
A fever overtakes a young lieutenant on the train home, distorting every sound, face, and passing hour.
At a crowded monastery, a traveller shares a room with a young convert whose restless search for learning has left him without a home.
On Christmas Eve, a nine-year-old apprentice writes home for rescue from hunger, beatings, and sleepless work in Moscow.
On his last night in the country, a young statistician walks into the moonlit mist with his host’s daughter and an unexpected confession.
As invulnerable creatures overrun Earth, a scientist sends ninety-nine volunteers into the fourth dimension to strike at their source.
A pilot risks a solo flight to Mars, where a hidden survivor and a silent alien intelligence reveal why Earth’s missions never came home.
After nearly six thousand years of immortality, a man who wants to die attempts a radical cure: rebuilding the world of his childhood.
When a reclusive professor’s familiar street begins to lose blocks and buildings, an old theory about reality becomes his only explanation.
A space Scanner temporarily regains his senses and learns that his own guild plans to kill the man who could make their sacrifice obsolete.
A Norwegian fisherman explains how careful observation saved him when a hurricane swept his boat into the Maelström.
A sick young man enters the Virginia mountains and returns with a precise memory of dying in another century.
A reclusive scholar's fixation on his cousin's teeth grows stronger as illness changes her body and mind.
A lost traveler follows an unusually beautiful lane to a cottage where every detail of the house and valley shows careful design.
A widower obsessed with his brilliant first wife brings a second bride into an abbey shaped by grief, opium, and dread.
After a storm destroys his ship, a skeptical traveler finds himself aboard an ancient vessel racing toward the South Pole.
A dying skeptic submits to mesmerism and uses the trance to answer questions about God, matter, pain, and life after death.
A widower watches his daughter grow into an exact copy of the wife whose death he once desired.
Seven men shut themselves inside a plague-stricken city and hold a desperate feast beside the body of their dead friend.
A demon describes a solitary man who endures a violent, unnatural landscape until the world around him becomes completely still.
Two reunited lovers discuss humanity's collapse and what one of them experienced as his body died, decayed, and lost its senses.
