A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
A wealthy engineer and a poor village try to become good neighbors, but suspicion and small grievances steadily undo their goodwill.
While showing an architect a condemned tenement, a landlord recalls how one family’s ordinary poverty became a rapid descent.
A gifted speechmaker is hired to honor a dead civil servant, but his polished tribute proves more reusable than anyone expected.
A gentle lawyer accepts a retired Cossack’s hospitality and spends a sleepless night inside the old man’s brutal, self-satisfied world.
A wealthy princess seeks spiritual peace at a monastery, where a former employee challenges her cherished image of her own goodness.
Seven-year-old Pashka is left overnight at a rural hospital, where promised treats give way to a world he cannot understand.
A gravely ill schoolmaster insists on attending the annual dinner that celebrates his pupils, determined to reject every hint of weakness.
On the long road back to her village school, an exhausted teacher confronts the life that work and isolation have reduced to routine.
On Christmas Eve, a resentful shoemaker meets a strange customer and gets a chance to trade poverty for wealth.
A young teacher wins the domestic happiness he imagined, only to find contentment raising questions about the life he has chosen.
In a shuttered provincial house, a mother and daughter sew endlessly for a marriage that remains only a hope.
Newly married to a wealthy older colonel, a young woman remains fixated on the indifferent friend she once hoped to marry.
On Christmas Eve, a nine-year-old apprentice writes home for rescue from hunger, beatings, and sleepless work in Moscow.
A Latin teacher decides to train a kitten as he trains pupils, with lessons that teach fear more effectively than skill.
As invulnerable creatures overrun Earth, a scientist sends ninety-nine volunteers into the fourth dimension to strike at their source.
A pilot risks a solo flight to Mars, where a hidden survivor and a silent alien intelligence reveal why Earth’s missions never came home.
A timid traveler is mistaken for a space-polo expert, then forced into a deadly match with his ship and reputation at stake.
A mild bookkeeper’s quiet tour of the Solar System turns him into an asteroid-town marshal with an alien beast for backup.
Three friends invent time travel, claim prehistoric America as a nation, and discover that founding a country is harder than reaching the past.
After nearly six thousand years of immortality, a man who wants to die attempts a radical cure: rebuilding the world of his childhood.
A hunted mutant slips past Pluto’s quarantine and finds a dead scientist, a false disaster, and a doorway to a world remembered only in nightmares.
A stranded fugitive boards a living spaceship and begins planning how to make its extraordinary power his own.
When a reclusive professor’s familiar street begins to lose blocks and buildings, an old theory about reality becomes his only explanation.
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.
