A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The narrator’s attitude toward the story.
A bored passenger on a future balloon tour writes a letter full of confident errors about the nineteenth century.
A cruel young baron takes possession of a violent horse that may carry the spirit of his family's dead enemy.
A solemn student prankster tests a famous duelist’s pride with an insult designed to turn etiquette against him.
A connoisseur leads his insulter down into the family catacombs to settle a score over a rare sherry.
A barber's son explains how plagiarism, paid praise, personal attacks, and business deals made him a national literary authority.
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 vain young heir falls for a woman he can barely see and rushes toward marriage before he understands who she is.
During a cholera outbreak, a nervous man sees a monstrous creature crawling down a distant hill.
Scheherazade tells one more Sinbad voyage, but the king finds modern science and technology less believable than magic.
A newly made Irish baronet competes with a French neighbor for a widow and mistakes every sign for proof that she favors him.
On a train to Paris, a proudly controlling mother carries a caged bird home while unknowingly passing the wreckage of her daughter’s love.
A writer reads a magazine’s promises of Romance while, far away, a famous bullfighter dies and is reduced to souvenir pictures.
A young Harvard poet and his older bride cross the Atlantic determined to begin a perfect marriage, but Europe has other distractions.
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 Parisian family’s summer outing opens a brief, charged interval between ordinary life and a happiness that cannot last.
News of the Republic reaches a Norman village, where a self-important doctor turns national upheaval into a personal campaign for office.
A celebrated society marksman provokes a duel, then spends a sleepless night confronting the fear his reputation cannot admit.
A self-styled naïve bachelor warns husbands after a lover's drunken confession unsettles his ideas about courtship.
Keeping vigil beside their revered mother, two austere children open the letters that preserve her private life.
After fifteen years apart, a Parisian visits an old friend and finds domestic contentment masking a disturbing family amusement.
Six years after separating over her affair, a proud baron wakes on a train opposite the wife he barely recognizes.
A childless couple’s expected inheritance comes with one condition, turning marital respectability into a desperate financial problem.
A provincial music lover enters a Paris artist’s studio expecting celebrities and finds himself drafted into a chaotic housewarming.
A reluctant officer accepts a respectable woman’s devotion and finds that her passion will not permit an easy retreat.
