A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
What would you like to read about?
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.
Two strangers take over a small-town lunchroom and wait for a former prizefighter who knows exactly why they have come.
After the crucifixion, three Roman soldiers drink, joke, and circle the question of what it means to endure suffering.
Two hunters leave a lonely Norman château for midnight Mass and a condolence call that turns Christmas custom into grim comedy.
A celebrated society marksman provokes a duel, then spends a sleepless night confronting the fear his reputation cannot admit.
A visitor to an asylum reads the journal of a collector whose antique cabinet concealed a relic that consumed his mind and desire.
An eighty-six-year-old health fanatic studies every local death, determined to prove that caution can defeat old age.
A dying disciple of Schopenhauer recalls the night his teacher’s corpse seemed to retain its terrifying power.
A dazzling Mediterranean boat ride turns from news of disaster to a friend’s indecorous tale about snow.
A naval officer recalls an Indian expedition where a prince’s troubling gift binds him to a child trapped by courtly power.
A resentful farm boy assigned to care for an old horse turns an ordinary chore into a test of mercy.
Hussars holding a ruined village turn Twelfth Night into an improvised feast before war abruptly reclaims the evening.
A seasoned traveller argues that real fear comes not from known danger, but from what the mind cannot explain.
A midnight train encounter leads two travelers through unsettling accounts of the dread inspired by things not yet understood.
A devoted hunter arrives late for the annual guillemot shoot carrying an obligation that tests the limits of his sporting priorities.
At a quiet spa, a traveler meets a frail young woman and her nervous father, whose strange afflictions share one terrible cause.
A frightened countess helps a wounded stranger cross a border, beginning a wordless bond neither dares disturb.
A seasoned boatman anchors for a quiet smoke on the Seine, only to spend the night trapped in fog, silence, and mounting terror.
An imperious old maid’s final illness exposes the private life she never allowed anyone to see.
A man with no obvious catastrophe explains why thirty years of repetition and one drawer of old letters have made life unbearable.
Letters hidden inside an old chasuble reveal a bedridden woman’s intimate meditation on the object that holds birth, love, illness, and death.
After his parents die, a blind farmhand becomes the target of a household’s escalating cruelty in rural Normandy.
A doctor’s attempt to protect a newborn at a Breton christening collides with custom, cold, and drink.
A law student turns a murderer’s preserved hand into a bell pull, dismissing every warning until terror enters his locked room.
