The most alluring stories about cities are those that revolve around our relationships to places and each other.
I have started on "Jaguar" — brief, strange, alluring stories about Mexico — and I have skimmed the "Memos," which are a collection of Calvino's lectures about literature.
The Harry Potter series had an alluring creation story, known to all fans: in 1990, on a delayed train between Manchester and London, Rowling was overwhelmed by the thought of a boy who learns, at the age of eleven, that he is a wizard.
It's an "alluring" fishing story.
As you tour Temeria (one part Scottish highlands, one part Idaho plains), following your primary quest objectives, you happen upon scores of alluring offshoot stories.
After the alluring dolls, the story's main character is the shape-shifting red cloak, last seen spiraling behind Santa's sleigh as it takes to the night sky.
Seeking ways to make a grim story alluring, Mr. Libatique and Mr. Aronofsky came up with what they call "hip-hop montages" -- rapid-fire sequences of images, like the repetitive riffs in hip-hop music, that recur in the film.
The narrative dominoes fall with masterly precision once Toby Bell returns, and by the time he's joined by Kit's alluring daughter the story settles into classic conspiracy thriller territory, the two of them racing to assemble evidence before they can be silenced by the men who pull the strings.
Stephen R. Haynes, a professor of religion at Rhodes College in Memphis, is less interested in the origins of Ham's supposed blackness than in why certain cultures have found the story so alluring.
