A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The narrator’s attitude toward the story.
After his parents die, a blind farmhand becomes the target of a household’s escalating cruelty in rural Normandy.
At a country christening, a priest discovers an unexpected tenderness as he holds his newborn nephew among the reveling family.
A lonely Parisian seeking company for the night hears a noise behind a hidden door in a sex worker’s rented room.
A law student turns a murderer’s preserved hand into a bell pull, dismissing every warning until terror enters his locked room.
An Indian prince’s cremation beneath the cliffs of Étretat confronts a French resort town with an unfamiliar rite.
An exile has built a fortune around one plan: return to the woman whose love ruined him.
A country gentleman records the invisible presence that seems to drain his strength, command his will, and turn his home into a prison.
Two guides winter alone at an Alpine inn until one vanishes into the snow and the survivor begins hearing his call.
Two homesick Breton soldiers share every Sunday—until a cowgirl’s kindness divides them.
During the Prussian occupation, an officer mistakes a grieving woman’s immobility for defiance and decides to punish her.
During a police roundup in rainy Paris, a young prostitute tells a passerby how poverty, abuse, and the law narrowed her choices.
A respected lawyer accused of violating his lover’s grave refuses counsel and asks a shocked courtroom to hear why he returned to her.
A young man explains how his mother’s final testament exposed the truth behind a brutal country household.
A family’s hatred of hunting begins with two brothers and the immense wolf that turns their winter chase into a private war.
A traveller pauses beside a dark reservoir and hears how two brothers faced a sudden, desperate accident there.
A beautiful countess rebels against the husband who has used pregnancy to control her, choosing a revenge designed to poison his certainty.
A chance meeting in a beer hall reveals why a once-privileged schoolmate has spent his adult life drinking at the same table.
An exhausted French detachment facing a deadly winter march finds unexpected resolve after taking two civilians under its protection.
A solitary collector watches every object in his beloved house walk away into the night—and no explanation can make the sight less real.
A stranger on a train recounts a second life in a future world, where love and private happiness stand against an approaching global war.
An inventor descends five miles beneath the ocean in a steel sphere and finds that the abyss is neither empty nor lifeless.
Alone in a remote Borneo observatory, an astronomer discovers that the darkness inside the dome holds a threat far closer than the stars.
After five years and most of his fortune, Monson must decide whether his flying machine is ready—or whether ridicule has forced the decision.
A young man forbidden to risk his finest clothes chooses one moonlit night to wear them freely and embrace the world beyond his home.
