A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The narrator’s attitude toward the story.
After burying his young wife, a colonel returns home to a letter in which she explains the hidden coercion behind her death.
A stranger’s watchful presence unsettles a fisherman’s household until his identity forces the family to reconsider every bond within it.
An unemployed carpenter walks from town to town seeking work until hunger and official suspicion drive him toward collapse.
A hunter’s letter about woodcock season turns to a rural killing and the local idea of honor that judged it.
During the siege of Paris, two old fishing companions cross the French lines for one peaceful morning beside the Seine.
After crossing a feared secret society, an arrogant colonial traveler finds that revenge follows him from Sierra Leone to London.
A neglected shopkeeper discovers that a crystal egg offers a living view of another world—and that its inhabitants may be watching back.
A quiet orchid collector longs for one remarkable event, then a mysterious plant from the tropics begins to bloom in his greenhouse.
A seaside walker discovers that unfamiliar deep-sea creatures have reached the English coast—and have developed a taste for human prey.
A new star grows brighter each night, and one mathematician realizes that its path will bring catastrophe to Earth.
Two exhausted adventurers follow a stolen treasure map into a tropical forest, certain that murder has put a fortune within reach.
Three horsemen pursuing a fleeing woman enter a silent valley where the wind carries vast webs alive with spiders.
A young scholar traces his family's troubled history from a decaying English estate to a ruined city deep in the Congo.
A former Southwestern outlaw explains how train robberies work—and why the life is not worth the price.
Stranded on a seemingly hospitable planetoid, a spaceman discovers that the only danger comes when he tries to sleep.
After a catastrophic time-machine demonstration, an inventor is condemned to become the living pendulum of the device he built.
Seekers from several species travel to a machine that knows everything, only to learn that knowledge depends on asking a valid question.
A voice in a psychology instructor’s mind guides him toward a way of seeing that strips ordinary reality of meaning.
In a ruined Kyoto gate, a hungry servant encounters a stranger whose desperate act forces him to decide what survival permits.
Wounded in a cavalry clash during the Sino-Japanese War, a Chinese soldier rides alone through the Manchurian fields with death suddenly close.
At Tokyo’s dazzling Rokumeikan ball in 1886, a seventeen-year-old Japanese woman dances for the first time with a visiting French naval officer.
