A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The narrator’s attitude toward the story.
A planter hunts the alien beast eating his crop, only to find that each mile of the chase makes his quarry smarter and more dangerous.
Telepath Underhill and his feline Partner, Lady May, must destroy an alien predator in the milliseconds between jumps through interstellar space.
A reclusive naturalist follows a cryptogram from a found parchment into the South Carolina woods in search of pirate treasure.
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 young couple uses two sailors' conflicting dates to satisfy an uncle's impossible demand that three Sundays fall in one week.
A proud newspaper editor answers a rival's insult with a paragraph built around one letter, then the type runs out.
A road trip through Italy becomes a tour of suspicious officials, theatrical hospitality, and the small absurdities of a country under Fascism.
As an autumn storm lashes Michigan, Nick Adams and Bill drink by the fire and talk around the breakup Nick cannot quite explain.
After the crucifixion, three Roman soldiers drink, joke, and circle the question of what it means to endure suffering.
A skeptical country doctor recalls the Christmas night when fear, faith, and illness combined to produce what others called a miracle.
A daring flirt makes her persistent admirer earn his chance during a wild-boar hunt at a Norman château.
A peaceable French merchant endures a Prussian officer’s insults until one final humiliation forces him to fight.
An eighteenth-century grandmother hears modern tales of jealous revenge and gives her sheltered granddaughter a scandalous lesson about love and marriage.
A nostalgic former clerk recalls the sunny Sunday walk when helping a lost couple led him far from his map and his innocence.
A road trip through Normandy leads to a chapel keeper who sells homemade saints and measures his drunkenness by degrees.
On his wedding night, an ardent Norman sportsman must choose between his waiting bride and suspected poachers.
Two sheltered brothers discover Parisian freedom until their formidable priest uncle arrives at the worst possible hour.
A sharp-tongued rail traveler records the sights, absurdities, and unsettling stories encountered along the French Riviera.
A newlywed tells his oldest friend that marital passion is ruining his health, then finds an arrangement that restores him.
Two hungry strangers sharing a slow train along the Mediterranean coast discover an unusual way to ease each other’s need.
A schoolboy's joke links a lonely Latin master with a laundress and gives a lesson no classical text can provide.
A fashionable niece condemns modern manners, and her older aunt answers with a sharper lesson in observation.
Five bored men ask a doctor for a new pleasure, and his account of ether offers more temptation than warning.
