A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The narrator’s attitude toward the story.
A landowner discovers the exact price of being noticed in a government office.
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 mock scientific essay defines the perfect swindler and catalogs the small cons that make fraud look respectable.
A group of confident American scholars revives an Egyptian mummy and discovers that he has a low opinion of modern progress.
A proud entrepreneur explains the strict method behind a career built on nuisance, provocation, fraud, and other unusual trades.
A journalist reports that an obscure chemist has found a way to turn lead into pure gold.
Two strangers take over a small-town lunchroom and wait for a former prizefighter who knows exactly why they have come.
A pregnant widow is sued in open court by the married man she promised to pay for helping secure an inheritance.
Three drunken artists in military costumes capture a burglar and turn his arrest into an improvised campaign.
When an ostrich supposedly swallows a priceless diamond aboard ship, five ordinary birds become the stakes in an escalating auction.
Over whisky, a taxidermist boasts that preserving nature is only the beginning of his art—and explains how easily collectors can be fooled.
A self-proclaimed 228-year-old gentleman recalls evenings with Samuel Johnson, Boswell, and their sharp-tongued London circle.
Two Klondike partners buy a handsome sled dog who refuses to pull and keeps finding them whenever they leave him behind.
Two veteran swindlers target a Pittsburgh millionaire’s passion for antiquities, while one partner tries to keep his conscience intact.
A traveling medicine seller uses personal magnetism to outwit a town's mayor, its doctor, and the law itself.
A traveling swindler recruits a mountain hog thief, only to discover that even a comic partnership has its own ethics.
Two snowbound prospectors educate themselves with very different books, then put their new knowledge to work in a small Montana town.
Jeff Peters explains the ethics of graft after teaming up with a burglar and a ruined financier in a town with one tempting bank.
Two confidence men corner a flood-bound town, but their monopoly faces an unexpected challenge from inside the partnership.
A sidelined cowboy asks his camp cook for pancakes and hears the wild story of a recipe, a romance, and a very successful deception.
A casual reader finds an alien invasion hidden in plain sight inside the figures of speech in a paperback novel.
Two stranded space travelers need fuel from a society whose idea of honorable warfare makes a simple recovery mission dangerous.
A student in a celebrated writing course objects to his professor’s rules for describing aliens and other planets.
