A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
Two friends promise to send a sign after death, and a meeting on a San Francisco street tests their pact.
A soldier survives an ambush on the frontier and returns to a fort where no one accepts his account.
A shoemaker accepts a forty-mile running bet while three men follow close behind in a cart.
An abandoned Vermont farmhouse draws three neighbors who want to test its haunted reputation.
An inventor claims that machines can think, then a visitor hears a struggle inside his workshop.
Identical twins share more than a face as one brother’s engagement turns dangerous.
An exhausted traveler checks into an Atlanta hotel and wakes to find his room occupied.
A stranger at a desert campfire tells how four prospectors were trapped in a cave thirty years earlier.
Two eager parents try to trap a schoolteacher into marrying their daughter, but their sacred evidence is less reliable than they think.
A Russian landowner insults his silent English governess while fishing, certain that language protects him from judgment.
An ailing bank manager meets a petitioner whose helplessness proves more exhausting than any official problem.
A drunken father asks his patient son for money, then confesses every lie without finding the strength to stop repeating them.
A practical railway guard hires a matchmaker and explains, in exact detail, the wife required for his future happiness.
A tipsy bridegroom regales a railway compartment with his philosophy of happiness while searching for the coach where his new wife waits.
A wealthy lover tries to settle an adulterous triangle with cash, only to discover that affection cannot be bought.
An unknown name on a civil councillor’s visitor list turns a small puzzle into a consuming spiritualist obsession.
A bored husband reads his wife’s rambling letter and lectures her ignorance, exposing a contradiction in what he expects from women.
A polite writer grants an aspiring dramatist half an hour to read her work and discovers that she has brought five acts.
A harmless sound in a wedding kitchen convinces a schoolmaster that scandal is about to ruin him.
A writer tends a wounded widower beside his wife’s coffin and listens as he tries to explain a despair he cannot explain to himself.
A respectable official finds a bundled baby on his doorstep and assumes his secret affair has finally caught up with him.
Fresh from Crimea, a young wife condemns her companion’s holiday flirtation while describing her own trip in increasingly revealing detail.
Sheltering from a storm, a fearful forester says wicked men frighten him more than wild beasts—then a cry comes from outside.
A retired lieutenant spends a sweltering day condemning the town’s idle natives while his own hours slip away.
