A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
What would you like to read about?
A Confederate sympathizer stands on a railroad bridge with a rope around his neck. Then the rope breaks.
A tipsy bridegroom regales a railway compartment with his philosophy of happiness while searching for the coach where his new wife waits.
A hotel waiter misplaces a piano-tuner’s boots, sending their anxious owner into an increasingly dangerous mix-up.
Two tipsy lawyers take a wrong turn after a long walk from the station and break into the wrong country cottage.
One enormous eelpout under a riverbank root draws workers, a shepherd, and their master into the water.
In a future where nations rent battlefields and fight by remote control, an untested pilot is handed three warships at once.
A man literally loses his breath and is mistaken for dead through a series of violent mishaps.
After a storm destroys his ship, a skeptical traveler finds himself aboard an ancient vessel racing toward the South Pole.
A cruel young baron takes possession of a violent horse that may carry the spirit of his family's dead enemy.
Seven men shut themselves inside a plague-stricken city and hold a desperate feast beside the body of their dead friend.
A drunk skeptic mocks reports of strange accidents, then meets the official responsible for making unlikely events happen.
Two souls meet after Earth’s destruction, and one explains how a newly discovered comet ended the human world.
A prince walls his court inside a castellated abbey to outparty a plague — through seven colored rooms.
A wounded soldier and a nurse fall in love in wartime Milan, trying to make a future together before the front and the armistice pull them apart.
War, revolution, bullfights, and executions flash past in hard-edged scenes where courage and brutality become nearly indistinguishable.
Two strangers take over a small-town lunchroom and wait for a former prizefighter who knows exactly why they have come.
A Parisian family’s summer outing opens a brief, charged interval between ordinary life and a happiness that cannot last.
A drunken wrong turn at a country wedding leaves a determined bachelor facing a second ceremony he never planned.
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 stranger’s watchful presence unsettles a fisherman’s household until his identity forces the family to reconsider every bond within it.
A failing shopkeeper finally tells his wife they face ruin, just as a family catastrophe offers an answer neither can admit wanting.
A quiet orchid collector longs for one remarkable event, then a mysterious plant from the tropics begins to bloom in his greenhouse.
A professional burglar poses as a landscape painter, only to find that art criticism is the least predictable hazard of the job.
A new star grows brighter each night, and one mathematician realizes that its path will bring catastrophe to Earth.
