A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Where does the story take place?
A peasant asks every authority he can find to free his convicted brother, but no one can tell him where justice actually resides.
At an isolated railway tavern, two devout cousins clash over faith, money, and family rights as resentment turns dangerous.
Seven-year-old Pashka is left overnight at a rural hospital, where promised treats give way to a world he cannot understand.
Condemned by the Inquisition, a prisoner must understand each new torture before darkness, a hidden pit, and a descending blade kill him.
A curious traveler visits a private asylum and joins an elegant dinner where every guest seems slightly out of place.
In a snowbound military hut, a major’s seemingly casual questions expose the dangerous private anxieties beneath his authority.
In a Milan hospital after the fighting, wounded soldiers submit their bodies to machines while trying to imagine who they will be afterward.
A visitor to an asylum reads the journal of a collector whose antique cabinet concealed a relic that consumed his mind and desire.
A celebrated cavalry officer returns from war expecting to reclaim his glamorous lover, only to confront a form of sacrifice he cannot understand.
A learned provincial doctor finds a manuscript that seems to settle the mystery of the soul—and lets one doctrine consume his reason and household.
In an asylum, a beautiful woman hides imaginary scars while a doctor explains the guilt behind her delusion.
A kindhearted coachman adopts an unwanted dog, but her devotion and unruly habits bring him to an impossible choice.
A peasant clown leaves the hospital with a healed leg and twenty-five francs, then spends his reward on a hazardous return to pleasure.
A disabled beggar, rejected from every familiar door, sets out hungry across a winter landscape governed by suspicion and contempt.
A young asylum doctor tests a homemade telepathic device on a violent sleepwalker whose dreams describe worlds far beyond Earth.
A sheltered poet marries a skilled occultist and begins to fear that she can force his mind out of his own body.
After inventing an immortality serum, a biologist is pursued by a secret organization determined to control the discovery.
A Buddhist priest’s determined campaign to shorten his extraordinary nose brings him the attention he thought he wanted, and also a new humiliation.
18 stories
