A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The narrator’s attitude toward the story.
Two souls meet after Earth’s destruction, and one explains how a newly discovered comet ended the human world.
An heir uses an immense fortune to create a private landscape meant to surpass nature without losing its beauty.
A man answers a childhood friend’s urgent summons and enters a decaying estate where the house and its last family seem bound together.
A condemned man argues that people are sometimes driven to do what they know will destroy them.
A solitary traveler watches a fairy circle a divided island as sunset turns the scene into a vision of aging and death.
A wealthy young man rejects status and politics to treat landscape gardening as an art and a plan for a happy life.
Two newly immortal spirits cross the stars while one explains how every word and action continues to shape the universe.
A man with catalepsy becomes consumed by the fear that one of his trances will be mistaken for death.
A disgraced man recounts how a namesake who looked and acted like him kept appearing whenever he was about to cross a moral line.
Two young friends race down an Alpine mountain, then linger over wine as marriage, school, and the end of freedom wait for them below.
A boy follows his jockey father through the racecourses of Italy and France, learning to love the horses, the crowds, and the man who rides them.
An aging bullfighter takes a cheap night fight in Madrid, determined to prove that the old skill and courage are still in him.
On New Year's Eve, a married woman asks her lover to prove whether his promises can survive a choice with real consequences.
A young joiner on trial for a double murder rejects an insanity defense and demands judgment on his own account.
A narrator studying a famously irresistible man finds the strongest clue to his charm in a woman’s portrait at home.
A suspicious husband takes his wife on a nocturnal hunt, convinced the quarry will expose her betrayal.
A visitor to an asylum reads the journal of a collector whose antique cabinet concealed a relic that consumed his mind and desire.
When a grandmother asks a gentle priest why he chose solitude, he recalls the childhood attachment that taught him to fear ordinary happiness.
An aging servant’s daily walk with his mistress prompts a question about thirty-five years of loyalty—and an answer neither has voiced.
An old marquis confesses why one visit to a dead woman’s locked bedroom left him afraid of darkness for life.
A young Norman soldier asks his parents to judge the Black woman he hopes to marry on her character rather than her skin.
Two lovers exchange letters over whether physical desire corrupts love or completes it.
A man who believes himself untouched by age meets the woman he once adored and sees twelve lost years all at once.
A seasoned traveller argues that real fear comes not from known danger, but from what the mind cannot explain.
