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Short Stories

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A Carnival Jangle
Alice Dunbar-Nelson
4 min
http://A%20Carnival%20Jangle
USA
There is a merry jangle of bells in the air,...
Violets
Alice Dunbar-Nelson
2 min
http://Violets
USA
I. “And she tied a bunch of violets with a...
Little Miss Sophie
Alice Dunbar-Nelson
9 min
http://Little%20Miss%20Sophie
USA
When Miss Sophie knew consciousness again, the long, faint, swelling...
Sister Josepha
Alice Dunbar-Nelson
9 min
http://Sister%20Josepha
USA
Sister Josepha told her beads mechanically, her fingers numb with...

Short Stories from around the world  |

Short Stories from around the world  |

Short Stories from around the world  |

Hidden Gems

Batrachophiles and Batrachophobes
Spain
The most beautiful part of the city of Cimannis—a name which the local scholars interpreted as a shortened form of City Magnificent—the first thing that they showed to foreign visitors was the clubhouse; and the most...
Batrachophiles and Batrachophobes
Miguel de Unamuno
7 min
The Emperor Franz Joseph’s Portrait
Czech Republic
In Mladá Boleslav there lived a stationer called Petiška. He was a man who respected the law and had lived, for longer than anyone could remember, across the road from the barracks. On the Emperor’s birthday...
The Emperor Franz Joseph’s Portrait
Jaroslav Hašek
6 min
Lazarus
Russia
When Lazarus rose from the grave, after three days and nights in the mysterious thralldom of death, and returned alive to his home, it was a long time before anyone noticed the evil peculiarities in him...
Lazarus
Leonid Andreyev
29 min
The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
Russia
A Fantastic Story   Chapter I I am a ridiculous person. Now they call me a madman. That would be a promotion if it were not that I remain as ridiculous in their eyes as before....
The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
34 min
A Strange Christmas Game
UK
It was the middle of November when we arrived at Martingdale, and found the place anything but romantic or pleasant. The walks were wet and sodden, the trees were leafless, there were no flowers save a...
A Strange Christmas Game
Charlotte Riddell
7 min
The Hidden Cause
Brazil
Garcia was standing, staring at his fingernails and cracking his knuckles from time to time; Fortunato, in a rocking chair, looked at the ceiling; Maria Luisa, near the window, was finishing off some needlework. For five...
The Hidden Cause
Machado de Assis
14 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
Kate Chopin
While waiting to be served she removed her gloves very leisurely and laid them beside her. Then she picked up a magazine and glanced through it, cutting the pages with a blunt edge of her knife. It was all very agreeable. The damask was even more spotless than it had seemed through the window, and the crystal more sparkling. There were quiet ladies and gentlemen, who did not notice her, lunching at the small tables like her own. A soft, pleasing strain of music could be heard, and a gentle breeze, was blowing through the window
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when the crosslights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it, I can almost fancy radiation after all,—the interminable grotesques seem to form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction
Tillie Olsen
Oh it is a handsome place, green lawns and tall trees and fluted flower beds. High up on the balconies of each cottage the children stand, the girls in their red bows and white dresses, the boys in white suits and giant red ties. The parents stand below shrieking up to be heard and the children shriek down to be heard, and between them the invisible wall “Not To Be Contaminated by Parental Germs or Physical Affection.”
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Dissolve one teaspoon of the quadraturin essence in one cup of water. Wet a piece of cotton wool or simply a clean rag with the solution; apply this to those of the room’s internal walls designated for proliferspansion. This mixture leaves no stains, will not damage wallpaper, and even contributes—incidentally—to the extermination of bedbugs

Our Classics

Rope
USA
On the third day after they moved to the country he came walking back from the village carrying a basket of groceries and a twenty-four-yard coil of rope. She came out to meet him, wiping her...
Rope
Katherine Anne Porter
11 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
An Episode in the Life of Marshal de Bassompierre
Austria
At a certain point in my life, my services entailed crossing the little bridge across the Seine (for the Pont Neuf was not yet built at that time) at a certain hour several times a week,...
An Episode in the Life of Marshal de Bassompierre
Hugo von Hofmannsthal
11 min
The Border-Line
UK
Katherine Farquhar was a handsome woman of forty, no longer slim, but attractive in her soft, full, feminine way. The French porters ran round her, getting a voluptuous pleasure from merely carrying her bags. And she...
The Border-Line
D.H. Lawrence
36 min
The Cat that Walked by Himself
UK
Hear and attend and listen; for this befell and behappened and became and was, O my Best Beloved, when the Tame animals were wild. The Dog was wild, and the Horse was wild, and the Cow was...
The Cat that Walked by Himself
Rudyard Kipling
16 min
The Gift of the Magi
USA
One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until...
The Gift of the Magi
O. Henry
8 min
The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids
USA
  The Paradise of Bachelors It lies not far from Temple-Bar. Going to it, by the usual way, is like stealing from a heated plain into some cool, deep glen, shady among harboring hills. Sick with...
The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids
Herman Melville
32 min
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
USA
A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man’s hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled...
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Ambrose Bierce
11 min
Enter Mitchell
Australia
The Western train had just arrived at Redfern railway station with a lot of ordinary passengers and one swagman. He was short, and stout, and bow-legged, and freckled, and sandy. He had red hair and small,...
Enter Mitchell
Henry Lawson
2 min
The Daughters of the Late Colonel
New Zealand
The week after was one off the busiest weeks of their lives. Even when they went to bed it was only their bodies that lay down and rested; their minds went on, thinking things out, talking...
The Daughters of the Late Colonel
Katherine Mansfield
28 min

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