A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The narrator’s attitude toward the story.
A vain minor poet mistakes his hunger for inspiration for a grand passion when a young admirer takes his rhetoric seriously.
On a carefully cultivated tour of Rome, a refined schoolteacher meets an ideal companion—until one social detail tests her affection.
A young builder finds a chest of silver beneath his fiancée’s garden and discovers that getting rich is harder than finding treasure.
A sighted mountaineer falls into an isolated valley where blindness is universal—and learns that his advantage has no accepted meaning.
A Brazilian gunboat sent against a plague of giant ants discovers an organized enemy capable of challenging human rule of the Amazon.
A professional burglar poses as a landscape painter, only to find that art criticism is the least predictable hazard of the job.
A confident rural army meets an enemy weapon built to cross trenches, resist rifles, and turn courage into a tactical liability.
A shy novice becomes a theater critic and finds the stage’s poses and speeches steadily replacing his own personality.
A grieving prince builds an ever more magnificent monument to his lost queen, refining it until devotion and art become hard to separate.
A penniless London dreamer searches night after night for Celephaïs, the timeless city he first entered in childhood.
A ruthless U-boat commander loses control of his submarine and drifts toward ruins on the Atlantic floor.
Three robbers target an isolated former sea captain whose house contains bottles that answer when he speaks.
A Yukon camp's judge wakes alone in a boat with no food and no memory of how he got there.
Reuniting with an old friend makes a Dublin clerk question the life and ambitions he has settled for.
A mother manages her daughter’s concert engagement and presses the organizers to honor their contract.
A solitary bank clerk forms an unexpected friendship with a married woman and must decide how close to let her come.
After a motor race, a wealthy young Irishman joins his foreign friends for a night of celebration.
Maria leaves the laundry for a Halloween visit with the family she helped raise.
After a drunken fall, a salesman’s friends try to guide him back toward the church.
On the anniversary of Parnell’s death, campaign workers shelter from the rain and argue over Irish politics.
A boarding-house owner decides how to handle her daughter’s relationship with one of her lodgers.
Two Dublin men arrange a meeting with a servant, and one spends the evening waiting for news.
A woman is surprised by her attraction to the friend her husband has invited to stay.
A shopkeeper develops feelings for a married locksmith and struggles with what her priest calls sin.
