A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
A perfectly ordered Dutch borough measures life by clocks and cabbages until a strange fiddler crosses the surrounding hills.
A vain French duke dies over a badly served delicacy and challenges the Devil to a card game for his freedom.
A condemned man argues that people are sometimes driven to do what they know will destroy them.
A barber's son explains how plagiarism, paid praise, personal attacks, and business deals made him a national literary authority.
A curious narrator searches for the secret behind a celebrated war hero whose perfect appearance seems too complete to be natural.
A curious passenger becomes obsessed with an artist's six-foot box and the strange marriage surrounding it on a voyage to New York.
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 vain young heir falls for a woman he can barely see and rushes toward marriage before he understands who she is.
A curious traveler visits a private asylum and joins an elegant dinner where every guest seems slightly out of place.
A murderer explains how he killed an old man, then hears a sound that destroys his confidence when police arrive.
A town's most trusted man leads the hunt for a missing neighbor while every clue points to the victim's disgraced nephew.
A young couple uses two sailors' conflicting dates to satisfy an uncle's impossible demand that three Sundays fall in one week.
A journalist reports that an obscure chemist has found a way to turn lead into pure gold.
A newly made Irish baronet competes with a French neighbor for a widow and mistakes every sign for proof that she favors him.
A proud newspaper editor answers a rival's insult with a paragraph built around one letter, then the type runs out.
In a garden cluttered with bathtubs and boot jacks, a very busy God tries to keep order.
A failing advance man hides beneath a hotel sheet while alcohol and drugs turn his last escape into a grotesque pursuit he cannot outrun.
A road trip through Italy becomes a tour of suspicious officials, theatrical hospitality, and the small absurdities of a country under Fascism.
A veteran boxer plans to lose the fight that will end his career—but keeping the money may demand one last act of courage.
A young Harvard poet and his older bride cross the Atlantic determined to begin a perfect marriage, but Europe has other distractions.
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.
A young couple follows a drunken local guide out of Cortina for an illegal trout-fishing trip that keeps slipping further out of reach.
A boy’s holiday glow collapses when his father reveals that the girl he loves has chosen someone else.
After being thrown from a freight train, Nick Adams finds food and company beside a campfire—but the prizefighter waiting there is not safe.
