A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The narrator’s attitude toward the story.
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.
Two men look up at a flock of starlings, and an entire town manufactures a crisis around their gaze.
A vanished rake, a locked room, and one foreign match send two investigators racing toward an elaborate murder theory.
Psyche Zenobia climbs an Edinburgh steeple in search of material for a sensation article and puts her head through a clock face.
An ambitious literary society secretary asks a famous editor to teach her the formula for a fashionable tale of extreme sensation.
A man becomes a social celebrity by making his nose the subject of a supposedly learned science.
A man literally loses his breath and is mistaken for dead through a series of violent mishaps.
A drunk skeptic mocks reports of strange accidents, then meets the official responsible for making unlikely events happen.
A perfectly ordered Dutch borough measures life by clocks and cabbages until a strange fiddler crosses the surrounding hills.
In a garden cluttered with bathtubs and boot jacks, a very busy God tries to keep order.
A failing advance man hides beneath a hotel sheet while alcohol and drugs turn his last escape into a grotesque pursuit he cannot outrun.
A stubborn skeptic discovers that any command he truly wills becomes real, though precision is not among his gifts.
A Venus-bound rocket crew blunders into battle in a delirious send-up of space-adventure pulp.
14 stories
