A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
On the road to an inquest, a magistrate challenges a doctor to explain a healthy woman’s precisely foretold death.
An accomplished engineer complains that the public knows performers and criminals better than builders and scholars—until his seatmate tests the claim.
One enormous eelpout under a riverbank root draws workers, a shepherd, and their master into the water.
A dignified old gardener answers a debate about justice with a legend about a town’s extraordinary faith in human goodness.
A vain provincial actor’s boast about a conquest turns dangerous when one listener knows the woman and demands satisfaction.
On Easter Eve, a worried deacon asks a learned priest to condemn his wayward son in a letter neither man can truly own.
A gentle lawyer accepts a retired Cossack’s hospitality and spends a sleepless night inside the old man’s brutal, self-satisfied world.
A vanished rake, a locked room, and one foreign match send two investigators racing toward an elaborate murder theory.
A boy discovers his governess’s secret romance and learns how much power a whispered threat can hold.
Three friends invent time travel, claim prehistoric America as a nation, and discover that founding a country is harder than reaching the past.
Psyche Zenobia climbs an Edinburgh steeple in search of material for a sensation article and puts her head through a clock face.
A cook who considers himself a great philosopher receives a visit from the Devil and tries to bargain away his soul.
A mock scientific essay defines the perfect swindler and catalogs the small cons that make fraud look respectable.
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.
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.
A bored passenger on a future balloon tour writes a letter full of confident errors about the nineteenth century.
A solemn student prankster tests a famous duelist’s pride with an insult designed to turn etiquette against him.
Toby Dammit's habit of betting the Devil his head becomes literal when a stranger accepts the wager at a covered bridge.
A group of confident American scholars revives an Egyptian mummy and discovers that he has a low opinion of modern progress.
A drunk skeptic mocks reports of strange accidents, then meets the official responsible for making unlikely events happen.
A condemned man traces his ruin through alcohol, cruelty, and two black cats that seem to expose every crime he hides.
A proud entrepreneur explains the strict method behind a career built on nuisance, provocation, fraud, and other unusual trades.
