A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The narrator’s attitude toward the story.
A shepherd meets a radiant stranger who vanishes whenever he questions her.
A banker’s reckless wager condemns a young lawyer to fifteen years of voluntary solitude for a fortune.
In court, a wife's plea for divorce reveals a husband whose worship of ideal beauty has become a fevered obsession.
A man defends an unforgivable marriage by tracing the grief, resemblance, and desire that brought a father to it.
A dying woman hires an advocate to find the son who vanished after discovering the secret at the center of her household.
A doctor’s defense of a desperate mother leads him to recount a widow’s struggle with pregnancy and public shame.
On a bright beach, a painter walks beside his disabled wife while a friend tells the harsh story behind their silent marriage.
A traveler visits a notorious countrywoman whose prosperity depends on the children society pays to stare at.
On a bitter Christmas Eve, an out-of-work watchmaker hears a violin through the wall just as he loses hope.
Exiled by his own pride, a reckless nobleman accepts a stranger's miraculous bargain.
On the eve of humanity’s first Moon rocket, the man who owns the launch company tries to stop a breakthrough he believes civilization is not ready to use.
A moonlit song outside a village house becomes the first chapter in a legend about Japan’s shape-shifting badgers.
From Paradise, the Buddha offers a single spider’s thread to a robber suffering at the bottom of Hell.
A Chinese landowner who can drink without ever growing drunk submits to an eccentric monk’s treatment for the creature said to live inside him.
14 stories
