A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Where does the story take place?
After emancipation, Aunt Peggy asks for a quiet cabin where she can spend her final days.
A plantation worker sets out for a week of visiting and stops at a sick boy's cabin.
A young man pretends to be ill, leaving his godmother to handle work meant for him.
A woman who has never wanted children must care for a neighbor's four youngsters.
An older woman refuses to leave the house she was given when freed from slavery.
A little girl offers lilies to a furious neighbor after her calf damages his crops.
A solitary narrator turns from people to the quiet of a summer night.
A prosperous man guards a grave whose story begins with a runaway schoolboy and a haunted young woman.
Two devoted sisters face the terrible cost of loving an outlaw.
A Swiss orphan torn between gratitude and love must reckon with a revolution gathering in her valley.
A ruined lawyer is offered cash for his inherited feud, forcing an old mountain honor code into a startling new bargain.
A struggling typist finds spring, memory, and a lost love hiding among the daily dishes on a restaurant menu.
A traveling swindler recruits a mountain hog thief, only to discover that even a comic partnership has its own ethics.
A sidelined cowboy asks his camp cook for pancakes and hears the wild story of a recipe, a romance, and a very successful deception.
Two bungling kidnappers discover that their captive is far more trouble than the ransom is worth.
A mountain couple arrives at a makeshift court demanding a divorce, only to discover that separation may be harder than marriage.
After eight years underground, three men risk the radioactive surface and find the robots fighting their war have kept a secret.
On a colonized, dying Mars, an exiled musician plays a tune that may summon a violent reckoning for Earth’s occupiers.
Three shape-changing aliens land on Earth to open an invasion route, but the planet offers forms their rigid caste system forbids.
An alien organism that converts every attack into food begins spreading across rural New York.
A moonlit song outside a village house becomes the first chapter in a legend about Japan’s shape-shifting badgers.
A Chinese landowner who can drink without ever growing drunk submits to an eccentric monk’s treatment for the creature said to live inside him.
When a devil disguised as a missionary plants a mysterious crop in sixteenth-century Japan, one cattle dealer makes a wager to learn its name.
A long-haul spacer returns to Earth to meet his newborn son, drunk, broke, and unsure whether he can stop choosing space over his family.
