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Short Stories

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The Fly
Katherine Mansfield
8 min
http://The%20Fly
New Zealand
” Y’ARE very snug in here,” piped old Mr. Woodifield,...
The Sevdah Machine
Jordan Silversmith
11 min
http://The%20Sevdah%20Machine
USA
Instruction Manual (Before You Listen) Low light, half-light, no light:...
Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote
Jorge Luis Borges
11 min
http://Pierre%20Menard,%20author%20of%20the%20Quixote
Argentina
For Silvina Ocampo   The visible oeuvre this novelist has...
The Day Sadat Flew to Jerusalem
Mona Yahia
10 min
http://The%20Day%20Sadat%20Flew%20to%20Jerusalem
Germany
–Crazy, isn’t it?   –It’s happening in our own lifetime!...

Short Stories from around the world  |

Short Stories from around the world  |

Short Stories from around the world  |

Hidden Gems

Esme
UK
“All hunting stories are the same,” said Clovis; “just as all Turf stories are the same, and all–” “My hunting story isn’t a bit like any you’ve ever heard,” said the Baroness. “It happened quite a...
Esme
Saki
6 min
Siamese Carcinoma
Mexico
While he was still awake, Castor was able to appreciate how much he liked hospitals. He so enjoyed being there, bathed in the light of the operating theatre, that he even ventured to ask the nurse...
Siamese Carcinoma
Ignacio Padilla
9 min
Biography of a Dress
USA
This dress I am wearing in this black-and-white photograph, taken when I was two years old, was a yellow dress made of cotton poplin (a fabric with a slightly unsmooth texture first manufactured in the French...
Biography of a Dress
Jamaica Kincaid
9 min
Outrage
Mexico
 Why do I want a life without honor if I already bet everything I had? A. Esparza Oteo   A highway can be like the high seas. The sun burning on your face, the fresh cleansing...
Outrage
Álvaro Enrigue
16 min
The Spider in the Jar
Canada
After collecting the beer bottles from the bunkhouses at the sawmill, the brothers headed into the forest behind their house to eat wild blackberries, until their bellies were rotten with them and their fingertips were stained...
The Spider in the Jar
Théodora Armstrong
5 min
Solid Objects
UK
The only thing that moved upon the vast semicircle of the beach was one small black spot. As it came nearer to the ribs and spine of the stranded pilchard boat, it became apparent from a...
Solid Objects
Virginia Woolf
9 min
The Other Two
USA
Waythorn, on the drawing-room hearth, waited for his wife to come down to dinner It was their first night under his own roof, and he was surprised at his thrill of boyish agitation. He was not...
The Other Two
Edith Wharton
29 min
Mikhail Bulgakov
The cat had grown into a dog and started bowling along not far from the sledge. I turned around and saw very close behind the sledge a second four-legged creature. I can swear that it had pointed ears and was moving easily behind the sledge, as if on a parquet floor. There was something menacing and insolent in its speed
Lorrie Moore
1981. On public transportation, mothers with soft, soapy, corduroyed seraphs glance at you, their faces dominoes of compassion. Their seraphs are small and quiet or else restlessly counting bus seat colors outloud: “Blue-blue-blue, red-red-red, lullow-lullow-lullow”
David Albahari
My pajamas had Disney characters all over them. I had been given them several years before by my wife: she went to the States as a Fulbright fellow, came back with the pajamas, then went there again. She said she was going for professional advancement, but never said what had to be advanced
Matías Candeira
My sons were complaining heartily about the tuxedos I had made them wear, but I have to say that their elegant, straight-backed, ambassadorial bearing, copious sweating and swatting at the mosquitoes buzzing about their necks was the very embodiment of the world where one walks on two feet and drinks Dry Martinis but leaves the olive glistening and untouched

Our Classics

A Gipsy Prophecy
Ireland
“I really think,” said the Doctor, “that, at any rate, one of us should go and try whether or not the thing is an imposture.” “Good!” said Considine. “After dinner we will take our cigars and...
A Gipsy Prophecy
Bram Stoker 
14 min
A Play
Russia
“Pavel Vassilyevitch, there’s a lady here, asking for you,” Luka announced. “She’s been waiting a good hour….” Pavel Vassilyevitch had only just finished lunch. Hearing of the lady, he frowned and said: “Oh, damn her! Tell...
A Play
Anton Chekhov
7 min
A Mighty Nice Man
USA
The child Charlotte sat on the narrow curbstone, her cheek against one knee, drawing idly in the dust with a stick. She sniffed at the flesh of her leg, smelt the dust and the sweat on...
A Mighty Nice Man
Patricia Highsmith
8 min
Two Friends
France
Besieged Paris was in the throes of famine. Even the sparrows on the roofs and the rats in the sewers were growing scarce. People were eating anything they could get. As Monsieur Morissot, watchmaker by profession...
Two Friends
Guy de Maupassant
8 min
The Sensible Thing
USA
At the Great American Lunch Hour young George O’Kelly straightened his desk deliberately and with an assumed air of interest. No one in the office must know that he was in a hurry, for success is...
The Sensible Thing
F. Scott Fitzgerald
21 min
The Yellow Wallpaper
USA
It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer. A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic...
The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
24 min
Napoleon and the Spectre
UK
Well, as I was saying, the Emperor got into bed. “Chevalier,” says he to his valet, “let down those window-curtains, and shut the casement before you leave the room.” Chevalier did as he was told, and...
Napoleon and the Spectre
Charlotte Brontë
4 min
The Wife of His Youth
I Mr. Ryder was going to give a ball. There were several reasons why this was an opportune time for such an event. Mr. Ryder might aptly be called the dean of the Blue Veins. The...
The Wife of His Youth
Charles W. Chesnutt
18 min
The Sphinx Without a Secret
UK
One afternoon I was sitting outside the Cafe de la Paix, watching the splendour and shabbiness of Parisian life, and wondering over my vermouth at the strange panorama of pride and poverty that was passing before...
The Sphinx Without a Secret
Oscar Wilde
5 min
Haircut
USA
I got another barber that comes over from Carterville and helps me out Saturdays, but the rest of the time I can get along all right alone. You can see for yourself that this ain’t no...
Haircut
Ring Lardner
19 min

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