Short Reads, Big Stories

A London detective solves complex crimes while his roommate takes notes on the absurdity of it all.

A plague ravages Florence, so ten friends hide in a villa to gossip professionally.

Two brothers collect stories, and the results range from charming hearthside warnings to absolutely deranged home-invasion nightmares.

A boy grows up in the wolf pack. The local tiger has objections.

A phantom billiards game, a kidnapper demanding gold for fingers, and a dream woman with a very real knife.

A Flea competes for a princess’s hand, a tree regrets growing up, and two rogues weave a suit of nothing.

A lanky teacher stalks a Dutch heiress until a headless rider intervenes.

A man walks into the mountains to avoid his chores and sleeps through a regime change.

A wife loses a borrowed necklace, a shepherd sees a spirit, and a Babylonian man tries to remain reasonable in Babylon.

Telepathy and horse racing collide; it turns out human nature is still just as messy as ever.

A detective returns from the dead. His friend is thrilled. The villains, less so.

Various Dubliners plan escapes, suffer minor social humiliations, and realize they are going absolutely nowhere in fifteen distinct portraits.

A college prank backfires, a fifteen-year courtship stalls, and five girls try to fix Christmas with a plummy fruit cake.

An old friend visits a crumbling estate where the architecture is as unstable as the family’s sanity.

An antiquarian’s curiosity proves hazardous as long-dead monks, cursed ash trees, and forgotten whistles unleash specific, physical, and very angry spirits.

A visitor arrives in an Austrian village, shows off, and explains why humans are completely hopeless.

Statues cry, birds sacrifice themselves, and giants learn the hard way that walls have consequences.

A knight prepares for the Crusades, but first he has to finish his cigarette commercial.

Wives are clever, husbands are suspicious, and the clergy is remarkably busy with other people's business.

A collection of Russian tales where a bowl of cherries delays a duel and an undertaker dines with his skeletons.

How the animals got their shapes, and why the cat still ignores your existence.

A king blows feathers into the wind to pick an heir while a soldier negotiates a living bear-skin suit.

Step-mothers, spinning wheels, and the constant threat of being eaten by someone you just met.

A collection of sleuths, secrets, and enough missing pages to fill a police report.

A mountain holds a face, a man builds a house of marble, and time never stops turning.

A Worcestershire squire’s household observes the social collapses, railway disasters, and local disputes of nineteenth-century English country life.

Monkeys talk, rabbits manipulate crocodiles, and peach-born children fight ogres. It is exactly as strange as it sounds.

A watch that loses time, a contract that kills its owners, and frogs that learn geometry.

Russian peasants outwork devils, survive crushing poverty in ten-foot stone rooms, and learn why a stolen egg starts a fire.

He lives in the canopy, talks to apes, and remains entirely perplexed by snakes.

Shadows of colonial New England, where reality is occasionally interrupted by ghosts, madness, and very stubborn men.

A collection of grim maritime encounters where treasure usually comes with a side of betrayal and a sharp dirk knife.

An Edwardian observer finds the world is full of sheep, mist, and very stubborn taxicabs.

Siblings wage a relentless campaign of imagination against the suffocating boredom of Victorian adulthood.

The fox is hungry, the rabbit is laughing, and the fiddle is playing a very dangerous tune.

A town prided itself on being incorruptible until a stranger left a sack of gold.

Four strangers get stuck in an elevator and end up as someone's oversized present.

A law student, a secretary, and several medical students encounter spectral visitors in isolated cabins and drafty city rentals.

A doctor prescribes rest for his wife. She decides to dismantle the architecture instead.

A stage play turns its readers into walking disasters. The city is just collateral damage.

An invisible predator stalks the wilderness, but the jury is only interested in your sanity.

Big Jake runs the city through fear, until his goons start slipping on soap and bad luck.

A century of tragedy in a cellar, until the narrator brings a carboy of acid.

Five different writers tackle the messy business of affection in a collection where nobody stays calm.

A boy grows fast, hides his twin in the attic, and everything goes wrong.

From murderous cats to phantom toes, twenty-five accounts of the supernatural range from the psychological to the suspiciously culinary.

A man inherits a box of clippings and discovers the stars are finally aligning for a giant, gelatinous apocalypse.

The little grey cells work overtime, while Hastings watches from the window in confusion.

Professor Fordney catches killers and kidnappers by spotting the one detail that doesn't fit a liar's script.

Stenographers type love letters for two dollars and manicurists read hearts in the hotel lobby.

Thirteen distinct windows into lives ranging from Andean bridges to the dusty streets of Gaza.

A clerk flaunts his youth, a woman vanishes into the mist, and a grandmother refuses to settle down for anyone.

A quiet priest walks into a major international manhunt. The criminal never stood a chance.

A man lures his enemy into a wine cellar. The enemy never leaves.

A dumpy priest with a club-like umbrella explains how he catches killers by mentally committing their murders first.

A legendary detective solves high-stakes mysteries involving horse racing and family secrets before meeting his match at a Swiss waterfall.

The detective retires to his bees, but the world keeps sending him its messiest problems.

A priest finds the truth where the professionals only find a headache.

An uncle challenges his niece to a duel of wits, and the referee is Poirot.

An American heiress boards a train with a fortune in jewels but never reaches her destination alive.

A wealthy uncle is shot, and his heirs expect a quick inheritance and zero consequences.

A dreamer haunts the embankments of Petersburg, waiting for a life that refuses to begin.

A surgeon ruins his life for a lady, a train vanishes without tracks, and the sky is full of jelly.

The world is on the brink of war, and Britain’s most famous detective has one last job.

A masked ball in New Orleans, a suicide pact in the city, and several ways to die for gold in Alaska.

A husband tests his wife's loyalty against a rapids-running sawyer. Nature provides the verdict.

Two vagabonds claim a kingdom, a traveler finds a village of the dead, and the colonial heat breeds restless ghosts.

A merchant protects his daughter from a Kaiser, a General endures weaponized sketches, and a house succumbs to the tide.

A cash-strapped couple separately sell their most prized possessions to buy Christmas gifts that neither can now actually use.

Bank clerks, failed actors, and aspiring composers navigate the perils of empty pockets and sudden romance in nineteen tales of London life.

A quiet copyist stops doing his job, then stops moving entirely, politely dismantling his employer’s logic with a single phrase.

A judge confesses to murder, a fisherman braves a storm, and irony waits around every corner.

A Confederate sympathizer stands on a gallows, dreaming of a narrow escape while the rope is already tightening.

People move through crowded rooms, busy harbors, and quiet grief, unaware of the thin lines between them.

A prince kneels, a hermit chats with ospreys, and the frost paints pictures on a bedroom window.

An old soldier brings a mummified paw to tea, turning a modest mortgage payment into a domestic horror story.

A man wanders his garden, stares at his reflection, and finds ghosts in the furniture.

Disillusioned vacationers, petty tyrants, and exhausted doctors navigate the quiet miseries and brief romances of the Russian provincial middle class.

A stranded chemist makes a friend on Mars. His friend is a bird-thing that talks in whistles.

A prince attempts to outrun a fatal pandemic by welding his doors shut and throwing a very expensive party.

Professional men encounter things that shouldn't exist, and things that certainly do.

A murderer mocks the law, a chess player faces a ghostly rival, and the dead refuse to remain quiet at evening.

A man returns to a rotting village to save his partner from a basement-dwelling horror.

A man burns in a marsh, yet his beneficiary is alive and present.

A chemist invents a perfect gold substitute, but forgets to patent the scent.

A collection where dolls come to life, storks gossip about aristocrats, and a match-girl sees heaven in a sulfur flame.

An eighty-year-old castaway on Mars receives a telephone call from a cruel stranger: his own twenty-year-old self.

The world's most famous gentleman burglar opens a detective agency to solve crimes for free, then robs the villains.

Two men recover eight-year-old stolen cash, but a nosy Grandpa accidentally ruins their quiet exit.

An artist moves to the California coast only to discover the local marine life wants his body and his soul.