A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The narrator’s attitude toward the story.
Two poachers on the Seine buy a dying donkey, turn its suffering into sport, and look for one more way to profit.
Years after an abusive fisherman vanishes at sea, his widow hears his commanding voice return inside her quiet home.
An innkeeper buys a stubborn widow’s farm on a life annuity, then grows impatient when she remains stubbornly healthy.
A peasant clown leaves the hospital with a healed leg and twenty-five francs, then spends his reward on a hazardous return to pleasure.
A farming couple schedule a funeral around the colza crop, but the dying old man refuses to cooperate with their practical plans.
A newspaper’s suicide statistics carry a riverside reader into a dream of a Paris institution that promises a quiet, respectable death.
A divorced man meets his remarried former wife at a hotel and turns their old grievances into a calculated new proposal.
A marquise arrives laughing with a secret: she has chosen a direct revenge on her jealous, abusive husband.
A coastal place-name preserves the story of an austere village priest whose hatred of desire turns violent on a storm-beaten cliff.
A poor, naïve farm girl enters service with a wealthy widower whose demands soon extend far beyond cooking and cleaning.
A Paris officer recognizes a former colonial soldier whose chaotic courage and appetite once shaped life inside a blockaded town.
A bedridden tavern keeper’s furious wife finds an outrageous way to make him useful.
A failing shopkeeper finally tells his wife they face ruin, just as a family catastrophe offers an answer neither can admit wanting.
A stranded collector hatches an extinct giant bird on a lonely atoll and gains a companion that keeps growing.
An abused laborer in a roaring power station begins to worship the largest dynamo as a god capable of judging his brutal supervisor.
After his rival dies, a celebrated entomologist discovers a moth no one else can see—and cannot stop trying to catch it.
A timid shopkeeper eats a strange mushroom after a domestic quarrel and returns home with a violent idea of merriment.
A nervous visitor steals a scientist’s deadliest culture and races across London with catastrophe—and fame—on his mind.
Confined to a couch, an invalid watches a distant manhunt as entertainment until the chase crosses the river and comes to his window.
When an orphan’s kitten vanishes in Ulthar, every cat in the village leaves home for the same night.
A talkative sheepherder takes a job on a lonely Texas ranch where a notorious train robber may be hiding nearby.
After a daring train robbery, two partners must decide who gets the only horse capable of carrying them away.
A hungry starship crew buys a hulking Martian animal, then learns its mind may be more civilized than their own.
A cuckoo clock takes sides in a failing marriage and refuses to behave like the possession its owner thinks he bought.
