A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
A lost traveler follows an unusually beautiful lane to a cottage where every detail of the house and valley shows careful design.
A widower obsessed with his brilliant first wife brings a second bride into an abbey shaped by grief, opium, and dread.
After a storm destroys his ship, a skeptical traveler finds himself aboard an ancient vessel racing toward the South Pole.
A cruel young baron takes possession of a violent horse that may carry the spirit of his family's dead enemy.
After saving a child from a Venetian canal, a mysterious man keeps a final appointment with the child's married mother.
A perfectly ordered Dutch borough measures life by clocks and cabbages until a strange fiddler crosses the surrounding hills.
An heir uses an immense fortune to create a private landscape meant to surpass nature without losing its beauty.
A mesmerist tests whether hypnosis can hold a dying man at the point between life and death.
A man answers a childhood friend’s urgent summons and enters a decaying estate where the house and its last family seem bound together.
A solitary traveler watches a fairy circle a divided island as sunset turns the scene into a vision of aging and death.
A convalescent observer follows an unreadable old man through London, convinced that his need for crowds hides a life of crime.
A prince walls his court inside a castellated abbey to outparty a plague — through seven colored rooms.
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 wounded traveler finds a portrait so lifelike that he searches a book for the story of the woman it depicts.
Condemned by the Inquisition, a prisoner must understand each new torture before darkness, a hidden pit, and a descending blade kill him.
A man with catalepsy becomes consumed by the fear that one of his trances will be mistaken for death.
During a cholera outbreak, a nervous man sees a monstrous creature crawling down a distant hill.
A disgraced man recounts how a namesake who looked and acted like him kept appearing whenever he was about to cross a moral line.
Nick Adams walks away from a burned town into the Michigan wilderness, building a camp and fishing the river one careful act at a time.
Two young friends race down an Alpine mountain, then linger over wine as marriage, school, and the end of freedom wait for them below.
An aging bullfighter takes a cheap night fight in Madrid, determined to prove that the old skill and courage are still in him.
In a small Michigan town, Liz Coates builds a private romance around the blacksmith whose return from a hunting trip changes everything.
Two hunters leave a lonely Norman château for midnight Mass and a condolence call that turns Christmas custom into grim comedy.
A skeptical country doctor recalls the Christmas night when fear, faith, and illness combined to produce what others called a miracle.
