A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The narrator’s attitude toward the story.
A boy approaches confession with fear, rivalry, hunger, and a vivid hope that absolution will make him new.
An impatient scholar waits to dismiss his late young secretary, then finds that their digressions are the part of the evening he values most.
Lost in a winter city, a carpenter’s dog is rescued by a circus clown who sees in her the makings of a performer.
On a remote railway line, an engineer’s late-night argument leads him to confess the human cost of his youthful nihilism.
A man tries to explain why the ordinary habits that once irritated him become forgivable when they belong to the woman he loves.
After an evening of ghost stories, a rational architect finds that a dark, empty house is more than his nerves can bear.
A weary court official reaches his summer villa hungry for dinner and rest, only to find that family life has no place ready for him.
A frightened surveyor invents a fearsome reputation to protect himself on a night journey—and makes his driver even more afraid.
A rational man recalls three ordinary sights that, in solitude and darkness, became sources of overpowering terror.
A sleepy family turns the last evening before Lent into an earnest campaign of lessons, tea, ritual, and still more food.
A boastful young lover challenges a lawyer to argue him out of marriage—and discovers how quickly conviction can yield to eloquence.
A Sunday animal market in Moscow becomes a crowded portrait of commerce, expertise, affection, and cruelty.
One accidental kiss awakens a shy officer’s hope that his ordinary life might contain love after all.
On Easter Eve, a worried deacon asks a learned priest to condemn his wayward son in a letter neither man can truly own.
A gifted speechmaker is hired to honor a dead civil servant, but his polished tribute proves more reusable than anyone expected.
A provincial household prepares for a high-ranking uncle whose summer visit unsettles its routines, loyalties, and ideas about cultivated life.
Seven-year-old Pashka is left overnight at a rural hospital, where promised treats give way to a world he cannot understand.
Two impoverished hunters, unable to reclaim a pawned gun, walk to the spring woods to see whether the snipe have arrived.
A starving she-wolf raids a forest hut for a lamb and carries off an unexpected captive with no sense of danger.
A Latin teacher decides to train a kitten as he trains pupils, with lessons that teach fear more effectively than skill.
A boy discovers his governess’s secret romance and learns how much power a whispered threat can hold.
A timid traveler is mistaken for a space-polo expert, then forced into a deadly match with his ship and reputation at stake.
A mild bookkeeper’s quiet tour of the Solar System turns him into an asteroid-town marshal with an alien beast for backup.
Three friends invent time travel, claim prehistoric America as a nation, and discover that founding a country is harder than reaching the past.
