A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Where does the story take place?
A mock scientific essay defines the perfect swindler and catalogs the small cons that make fraud look respectable.
After promising his dying cousin that he will never love again, a grieving man leaves their hidden valley and faces a second love.
A guide takes a modern visitor through ancient Antioch, where a violent king prepares an animal costume for his latest public triumph.
An ambitious literary society secretary asks a famous editor to teach her the formula for a fashionable tale of extreme sensation.
Two drunken sailors enter a plague-sealed London district and interrupt a grotesque court meeting in an undertaker’s shop.
A man becomes a social celebrity by making his nose the subject of a supposedly learned science.
A man literally loses his breath and is mistaken for dead through a series of violent mishaps.
Seven men shut themselves inside a plague-stricken city and hold a desperate feast beside the body of their dead friend.
A drunk skeptic mocks reports of strange accidents, then meets the official responsible for making unlikely events happen.
After saving a child from a Venetian canal, a mysterious man keeps a final appointment with the child's married mother.
A proud entrepreneur explains the strict method behind a career built on nuisance, provocation, fraud, and other unusual trades.
A connoisseur leads his insulter down into the family catacombs to settle a score over a rare sherry.
A curious narrator searches for the secret behind a celebrated war hero whose perfect appearance seems too complete to be natural.
A convalescent observer follows an unreadable old man through London, convinced that his need for crowds hides a life of crime.
When two women are brutally killed in a locked Paris room, Dupin tests the evidence that the police dismiss.
A stolen royal letter remains inside a minister's home despite months of secret police searches, and Dupin asks what they failed to see.
A vain young heir falls for a woman he can barely see and rushes toward marriage before he understands who she is.
A disgraced man recounts how a namesake who looked and acted like him kept appearing whenever he was about to cross a moral line.
A proud newspaper editor answers a rival's insult with a paragraph built around one letter, then the type runs out.
On a train to Paris, a proudly controlling mother carries a caged bird home while unknowingly passing the wreckage of her daughter’s love.
A failing advance man hides beneath a hotel sheet while alcohol and drugs turn his last escape into a grotesque pursuit he cannot outrun.
A wounded soldier and a nurse fall in love in wartime Milan, trying to make a future together before the front and the armistice pull them apart.
A writer reads a magazine’s promises of Romance while, far away, a famous bullfighter dies and is reduced to souvenir pictures.
In a rainy Italian hotel, an American wife goes after a stray cat and discovers how many other things she wants.
