On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench. The world…

IT WAS a tiny town, worse than a village, inhabited chiefly by old people who so seldom died that it was really vexatious. Very few coffins were needed for the hospital and the jail; in a word, business was bad. If Yakov Ivanov had been a maker of coffins…

She was dying and he was the richest man in the world, but he couldn’t buy her life. So he did the next best thing. He built the house, different from any other house that had ever been. She was transported to it by ambulance, and their goods and furnishings…

The celebration had a long way to go and even in the silent depths of Multivac’s underground chambers, it hung in the air. If nothing else, there was the mere fact of isolation and silence. For the first time in a decade, technicians were not scurrying about…

Billy Weaver had travelled down from London on the slow afternoon train, with a change at Swindon on the way, and by the time he got to Bath it was about nine o’clock in the evening and the moon was coming up out of a clear starry sky over the houses opposite…

The hermit invariably shuddered when he looked out of his window. The house across the street was occupied by a shameless woman. Late in the evening, men kept coming and knocking on her door—afternoons, too, if there was a festival or holiday. Sometimes they…

The problem is credibility. The problem, as I’m finding out over the last few weeks, is basic credibility. A lot of people look at me and say, sure Rick, Bigfoot stole your wife. It makes me sad to see it, the look of disbelief in each person’s eye. Trudy’s…

WAS S TIFF AND COLD, I was a bridge, I lay across a ravine. My feet were dug into one cliff, my hands into the other, I gripped the crumbling clay. The tails of my coat fluttered at my sides. Deep below me roared an icy trout river. No tourist ever strayed…

The nocturnal dark-blue blackness of the sky, covered in quietly floating clouds, everywhere white, but beside the high moon pale blue. If you look closely, it isn’t the clouds floating, it’s the moon, and near it, together with it, a star’s golden tear is…

She didn’t know if it was him or the dog. It wasn’t her. The dog was lying there on the living-room rug between them, she was on the sofa, and her visitor, rather tense, was sunk deep in a low armchair, and the smell, rather gentle, came into the air. She…

Before the monumental pandemonium of progress, anyone who had any savings buried them. That was the only way people knew to safeguard their money; it was only later they learned to have confidence in banks. Once the highway came through and it became easier…

YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN came forth at sunset into the street at Salem village; but put his head back, after crossing the threshold, to exchange a parting kiss with his young wife. And Faith, as the wife was aptly named, thrust her own pretty head into the street…

Walter Such was a translator. He liked to write with a green fountain pen that he had a habit of raising in the air slightly after each sentence, almost as if his hand were a mechanical device. He could recite lines of Blok in Russian and then give Rilke’s…

The long June twilight faded into night. Dublin lay enveloped in darkness but for the dim light of the moon that shone through fleecy clouds, casting a pale light as of approaching dawn over the streets and the dark waters of the Liffey. Around the beleaguered…

A certain old lady, out of excessive curiosity, fell out of a window and splattered on the ground. Another old lady peeked out of the window, staring down at the remains of the first one, but she also, out of excessive curiosity, fell out of the window and…

I'd sing of Love in such a novel fashion that from her cruel side I would draw by force a thousand sighs a day, kindling again in her cold mind a thousand high desires; I'd see her lovely face transform quite often her eyes grow wet and more compassionate…

At any rate, our stomachs were empty. No, in fact, we were starving. It was as if we had gulped down a vacuum in space. It began really small, a small vacuum like a hole in a doughnut, but as the day passed, the feeling inside our bodies increased until it…

NEW YEAR’S EVE. Nellie, the daughter of a landowner and general, a young and pretty girl, dreaming day and night of being married, was sitting in her room, gazing with exhausted, half-closed eyes into the looking-glass. She was pale, tense, and as motionless…

The hotel stood like a hollowed dry bone under the very centre of the desert sky where the sun burned the roof all day. All night, the memory of the sun stirred in every room like the ghost of an old forest fire. Long after dusk, since light meant heat, the…

Here is my gift, not roses on your grave, not sticks of burning incense. You lived aloof, maintaining to the end your magnificent disdain. You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes, and suffocated inside stifling walls. Alone you let the terrible stranger…