A universe of hexagonal galleries holding every possible 410-page book, nearly all of them gibberish.
An officer demonstrates the machine that writes a condemned man's sentence into his back over twelve hours.
Seven contradictory accounts of one killing in a bamboo grove, the dead man's included; the source of Rashomon.
A village gathers on a June morning for the annual draw; the New Yorker lost subscribers over what the draw is for.
An angel lands face-down in a courtyard after a storm, and the village starts charging admission to look at him.
A city whose happiness depends on one child kept in a cellar, and the few citizens who leave rather than accept the terms.
Tezuka's eight-volume life of Siddhartha, funny and profound.
She sells her hair to buy him a chain for his watch; he sells the watch to buy her combs for her hair.
A sailor adrift in the Pacific on the eve of 1914; Hugo Pratt's literary adventurer.
Charlie Brown, Snoopy and fifty years of small despair; start with the 1950s.
Tintin searches the Himalayas for Chang after a plane crash; Herge's own favourite, without a villain.
A clerk's wife borrows a diamond necklace for one ball, loses it, and spends ten years paying off the replacement.
A Wall Street copyist answers every instruction with "I would prefer not to" and stops doing anything at all.
A village of indomitable Gauls, a magic potion and Romans to thump; the first of thirty-nine.
Tintin in 1930s Shanghai against opium smugglers and the Japanese occupation; the album where Herge did his research.
A St Petersburg copying clerk saves for months for a new coat and is robbed of it on the first night he wears it.
A man reads the Confucian histories and finds the words "eat people" written between every line; the first story in modern vernacular Chinese.
Three wishes on a mummified paw, and the knocking at the door after the second one.
A Dublin party, a song heard on the stairs, and a husband learning about the boy his wife loved first; the last story in Dubliners.
A gilded statue and a swallow give away his gold leaf and his sapphire eyes to the poor, and both are thrown out.
A murderer insists on his own sanity while the old man's heartbeat gets louder under the floorboards.
A woman shut in a nursery for a rest cure starts reading the wallpaper and finds a figure creeping behind the pattern.
Two married people meet in Yalta expecting a holiday affair and find they cannot end it; the story modern short fiction is measured against.
A mermaid trades her voice for legs that hurt at every step, and does not get the prince; Andersen's ending is not the film's.
A six-year-old and his tiger, ten years of strips and Spaceman Spiff.
A chimpanzee who wants to be human and two scouts, from 1957; the longest-running Polish comic.
Ichabod Crane rides home past the churchyard and meets the Headless Horseman; the first American ghost story.
Two Slavic warriors defend the village of Mirmilowo against the Zbojcerze; Poland's Asterix.
A successful judge falls ill and works out, over three months of dying, that he lived the whole thing wrong.
Maya Angelou's childhood in Arkansas and the years of silence after the rape; the first of seven memoirs.
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