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Talma Gordon
Pauline E. Hopkins
24 min
http://Talma%20Gordon
USA
The Canterbury Club of Boston was holding its regular monthly...
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...

Short Stories from around the world  |

Short Stories from around the world  |

Short Stories from around the world  |

Hidden Gems

The Pit
Peru
“You really ought to see it before you go,” said Wordsworth. “It’s not something to be missed. That is, of course, if you dare …” Wordsworth tended to get a little peevish in the early hours...
The Pit
Santiago Roncagliolo
4 min
Sleepy
Russia
Night. Varka, the little nurse, a girl of thirteen, is rocking the cradle in which the baby is lying, and humming hardly audibly: “Hush-a-bye, my baby wee, While I sing a song for thee.” A little...
Sleepy
Anton Chekhov
9 min
The Mark on the Wall
UK
Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one...
The Mark on the Wall
Virginia Woolf
12 min
You're Laughing
Italy
Shaken by his wife with an angry tug on the arm, jolted out of his sleep again that night, was poor Mister Anselmo. “You’re laughing!” Dazed, and with his nose still stuffy from sleep, and wheezing...
You're Laughing
Luigi Pirandello
9 min
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
The Blizzard
Russia
 Now, just like a beast, it’s howling, Now it cries, just like a child. The whole story began, according to the omniscient Aksinya, with Palchikov the clerk, who lived in Shalometyevo, falling in love with the...
The Blizzard
Mikhail Bulgakov
20 min
My First Goose
Russia
Savitsky, the commander of the Sixth Division, rose when he saw me, and I was taken aback by the beauty of his gigantic body. He rose — his breeches purple, his crimson cap cocked to the...
My First Goose
Isaac Babel
5 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

The Cheapest Nights
Egypt
After the evening prayer, curses came streaming out of Abdel Karim’s mouth, striking the village fathers and mothers and taking in Tantawi and his forebears on the way. The story was that Abdel Karim had hardly...
The Cheapest Nights
Yusuf Idris
6 min
Gottfried Heinrich's Dream
Catalonia
It is music: it has come from a heart. J.S.B. At four in the afternoon the old man sat up in bed and said Kaspar, son, where are you? B flat, A, D flat, B, C....
Gottfried Heinrich's Dream
Jaume Cabré
12 min
The City
Russia
It was an immense city in which they lived: Petrov, clerk in a commercial bank, and he, the other,—name unknown. They used to meet once a year, at Easter, when they both went to pay a...
The City
Leonid Andreyev
11 min
Rustic Chivalry
Italy
Turiddu Macca, the son of mistress Nunzia, when he came home from being a soldier, every afternoon strutted about the piazza with his bersagliere uniform and his red cap, that looked like a fortune-teller’s when he...
Rustic Chivalry
Giovanni Carmelo Verga
6 min
The Happy Prince
UK
The statue of the Happy Prince stood high above the city. It was covered with gold, its eyes were bright blue jewels, and a red jewel hung from its waist. Everyone thought that it was very...
The Happy Prince
Oscar Wilde
7 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
Odour of Chrysanthemums
UK
The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston—with seven full waggons. It appeared round the corner with loud threats of speed, but the colt that it startled from among the gorse, which...
Odour of Chrysanthemums
D.H. Lawrence
22 min
Impoverished
Russia
  I When the waste and dreariness of her life become too much for Zivia, the younger and more embittered of the two unmarried Pozis sisters, she stops eating and washing. Wearing only her shift and...
Impoverished
David Bergelson
11 min
An Alcoholic Case
USA
‘Let–go–that–Oh-h-h! Please, now, will you? Don’t start drinking again! Come on–give me the bottle. I told you I’d stay awake givin’ it to you. Come on. If you do like that a-way–then what are you going to be...
An Alcoholic Case
F. Scott Fitzgerald
9 min
The Picture Horse
China
A certain Mr. Ts’ui, of Lin-ch’ing, was too poor to keep his garden walls in repair, and used often to find a strange horse lying down on the grass inside. It was a black horse marked...
The Picture Horse
Pu Sung-ling
2 min

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