A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Where does the story take place?
During a police roundup in rainy Paris, a young prostitute tells a passerby how poverty, abuse, and the law narrowed her choices.
A farming couple schedule a funeral around the colza crop, but the dying old man refuses to cooperate with their practical plans.
A respected village priest receives a ragged visitor whose face and faded photograph reopen the betrayal that drove him into the Church.
A lonely woman adopts an orphan for love, then begins to fear the silent young man growing up inside her house.
A stolen farm rabbit sends two pleased policemen after a suspect whose hiding place exposes more than one rural offense.
A frugal Norman peasant picks up a scrap of string on market day and finds that a harmless act can destroy a man’s reputation.
A disabled beggar, rejected from every familiar door, sets out hungry across a winter landscape governed by suspicion and contempt.
An unemployed carpenter walks from town to town seeking work until hunger and official suspicion drive him toward collapse.
A hunter’s letter about woodcock season turns to a rural killing and the local idea of honor that judged it.
A poor, naïve farm girl enters service with a wealthy widower whose demands soon extend far beyond cooking and cleaning.
During the siege of Paris, two old fishing companions cross the French lines for one peaceful morning beside the Seine.
A terrified Prussian straggler searches occupied Normandy for the safest possible enemy: someone willing to take him prisoner.
An exhausted French detachment facing a deadly winter march finds unexpected resolve after taking two civilians under its protection.
A vain minor poet mistakes his hunger for inspiration for a grand passion when a young admirer takes his rhetoric seriously.
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 young man forbidden to risk his finest clothes chooses one moonlit night to wear them freely and embrace the world beyond his home.
A professional burglar poses as a landscape painter, only to find that art criticism is the least predictable hazard of the job.
A grieving prince builds an ever more magnificent monument to his lost queen, refining it until devotion and art become hard to separate.
A timid shopkeeper eats a strange mushroom after a domestic quarrel and returns home with a violent idea of merriment.
Confined to a couch, an invalid watches a distant manhunt as entertainment until the chase crosses the river and comes to his window.
After a meteor lands on a New England farm, the soil, animals, and family begin to change in ways that local science cannot explain.
Caught in a storm, a genealogist takes shelter in an isolated New England farmhouse whose ancient owner studies a gruesome engraving.
Randolph Carter, cut off from the dream worlds of his youth, follows an inherited silver key toward his childhood home and a possible way back.
