A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The narrator’s attitude toward the story.
A reclusive count explains why a traveling mother, her daughter, and a different grateful companion visit him every July.
A bickering couple hears a midnight intruder in the garden, and the husband’s investigation changes their marriage.
An experienced aunt advises her unhappy niece on the fine art of giving a kiss without wearing out its power.
A Norman peasant explains how Saint Michel acquired the Devil’s rich farmland through bargains, crops, and local cunning.
A boastful old bachelor recalls his first society affair and the practical lesson he learned about privacy.
A fallen log prompts an old bachelor to explain how one dangerous evening ended a close friendship and settled his view of marriage.
A shaved moustache sends a society woman from bedroom complaint to a memory of recognizing French soldiers among the dead.
An opium dreamer explains why the imagined East offers him the peace and pleasure he cannot find in modern life.
A stolen farm rabbit sends two pleased policemen after a suspect whose hiding place exposes more than one rural offense.
A surgeon’s false tale about a stolen saint’s relic impresses his devout fiancée—until she visits Cologne herself.
A confident Parisian explains how two carefully scheduled affairs collapsed through a silent exchange of pins in his bedroom.
A reluctant traveler bound for Italy meets an aloof young woman whose sudden proposal reshapes his carefully planned holiday.
An aging sportsman keeps hunting season alive through elaborate dinners, improbable anecdotes, and one coveted delicacy.
A chance encounter in a provincial tobacco shop revives a vanished world of river outings, hard work, and ingenious schemes.
At the Last Judgment, tyrants, saints, and ordinary souls learn that divine scrutiny exposes more than public sins.
A shipwreck survivor in a diving suit is mistaken for a god, but keeping up the role may cost him the treasure he came to recover.
A mild schoolmaster tests his courage with a harmless mock burglary and stumbles into a real criminal escape.
A village shop assistant returns from three missing weeks with ashes in his pockets and a love he cannot explain or forget.
A young schoolmaster receives a golden fruit said to grant perfect knowledge, just as he begins his respectable new career.
A ragged stranger claims to carry a fortune in man-made diamonds, but every proof of his success has made him look more like a criminal.
A colonial patrol trapped on a cliff must escape enemy fire, thirst, and a drop that seems impossible to survive.
A housemaid watches her respectable fiancé rise in the world—and begin to treat their long engagement as something beneath him.
A shabby barroom storyteller explains how he was promised a fortune by an unread author—and why he never received it.
A father follows his young son into a shop where stage tricks become genuine magic and every doorway leads deeper from ordinary London.
