A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Where does the story take place?
A fever overtakes a young lieutenant on the train home, distorting every sound, face, and passing hour.
A Latin teacher decides to train a kitten as he trains pupils, with lessons that teach fear more effectively than skill.
Prescribed total rest in a nursery with barred windows, a young wife begins to study the wallpaper.
After nearly six thousand years of immortality, a man who wants to die attempts a radical cure: rebuilding the world of his childhood.
When a reclusive professor’s familiar street begins to lose blocks and buildings, an old theory about reality becomes his only explanation.
A space Scanner temporarily regains his senses and learns that his own guild plans to kill the man who could make their sacrifice obsolete.
A lost traveler follows an unusually beautiful lane to a cottage where every detail of the house and valley shows careful design.
A dying skeptic submits to mesmerism and uses the trance to answer questions about God, matter, pain, and life after death.
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 mesmerist tests whether hypnosis can hold a dying man at the point between life and death.
During a cholera outbreak, a nervous man sees a monstrous creature crawling down a distant hill.
A murderer explains how he killed an old man, then hears a sound that destroys his confidence when police arrive.
A young couple uses two sailors' conflicting dates to satisfy an uncle's impossible demand that three Sundays fall in one week.
A newly made Irish baronet competes with a French neighbor for a widow and mistakes every sign for proof that she favors him.
A failing advance man hides beneath a hotel sheet while alcohol and drugs turn his last escape into a grotesque pursuit he cannot outrun.
In a rainy Italian hotel, an American wife goes after a stray cat and discovers how many other things she wants.
A veteran returns to his Oklahoma home after the war and finds that the town, his family, and the future they expect no longer fit him.
A boy’s holiday glow collapses when his father reveals that the girl he loves has chosen someone else.
A doctor’s claim to some driftwood is challenged by the lumberman who knows exactly where the logs came from.
As an autumn storm lashes Michigan, Nick Adams and Bill drink by the fire and talk around the breakup Nick cannot quite explain.
A celebrated society marksman provokes a duel, then spends a sleepless night confronting the fear his reputation cannot admit.
Keeping vigil beside their revered mother, two austere children open the letters that preserve her private life.
