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.
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.
Charlie Brown, Snoopy and fifty years of small despair; start with the 1950s.
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.
Two Slavic warriors defend the village of Mirmilowo against the Zbojcerze; Poland's Asterix.
A woman shut in a nursery for a rest cure starts reading the wallpaper and finds a figure creeping behind the pattern.
A chimpanzee who wants to be human and two scouts, from 1957; the longest-running Polish comic.
A murderer insists on his own sanity while the old man's heartbeat gets louder under the floorboards.
A sailor adrift in the Pacific on the eve of 1914; Hugo Pratt's literary adventurer.
Three wishes on a mummified paw, and the knocking at the door after the second one.
A robot boy built by a grieving scientist; Tezuka, the god of manga, from 1952.
Ichabod Crane rides home past the churchyard and meets the Headless Horseman; the first American ghost story.
A Wall Street copyist answers every instruction with "I would prefer not to" and stops doing anything at all.
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 six-year-old and his tiger, ten years of strips and Spaceman Spiff.
Tintin searches the Himalayas for Chang after a plane crash; Herge's own favourite, without a villain.
A village of indomitable Gauls, a magic potion and Romans to thump; the first of thirty-nine.
A clerk's wife borrows a diamond necklace for one ball, loses it, and spends ten years paying off the replacement.
A successful judge falls ill and works out, over three months of dying, that he lived the whole thing wrong.
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.
She sells her hair to buy him a chain for his watch; he sells the watch to buy her combs for her hair.
Tezuka's eight-volume life of Siddhartha, funny and profound.
Tintin in 1930s Shanghai against opium smugglers and the Japanese occupation; the album where Herge did his research.
A man reads the Confucian histories and finds the words "eat people" written between every line; the first story in modern vernacular Chinese.
John Hersey follows six survivors through the day of the bomb; the New Yorker gave it a whole issue.
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