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Short Stories

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Amelia Webster
Jane Austen
1 min
http://Amelia%20Webster
UK
Letter the first To Miss Webster My dear Amelia You...
A Predicament
Edgar Allan Poe
14 min
http://A%20Predicament
USA
What chance, good lady, hath bereft you thus?—COMUS. It was...
Two Collectors
George Gissing
5 min
http://Two%20Collectors
UK
The delight of his youth had become the burden of...
The beautifull Cassandra
Jane Austen
1 min
http://The%20beautifull%20Cassandra
UK
a novel in twelve Chapters. dedicated by permission to Miss...

Short Stories from around the world  |

Short Stories from around the world  |

Short Stories from around the world  |

Hidden Gems

The Grand Inquisitor
Russia
“Quite impossible, as you see, to start without an introduction,” laughed Ivan. “Well, then, I mean to place the event described in the poem in the sixteenth century, an age—as you must have been told at...
The Grand Inquisitor
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
25 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
A Haunted House
UK
Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure—a ghostly couple. “Here we left it,” she said. And he added, “Oh,...
A Haunted House
Virginia Woolf
2 min
A Joke
Russia
IT was noon of a bright winter’s day. The air was crisp with frost, and Nadia, who was walking beside me, found her curls and the delicate down on her upper lip silvered with her own...
A Joke
Anton Chekhov
4 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
The Wizard
Japan
Well now, esteemed readers, I am now in Ōsaka and shall therefore relate a local story. Long ago there was a man who came to the city to seek a position as a menial. Ranking as...
The Wizard
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
5 min
The Other Woman
USA
“I am in love with my wife,” he said–a superfluous remark, as I had not questioned his attachment to the woman he had married. We walked for ten minutes and then he said it again. I...
The Other Woman
Sherwood Anderson
14 min
Bram Stoker 
There came a flash of forked lightning that lit up the whole expanse of the heavens. In the instant, as I am a living man, I saw, as my eyes turned into the darkness of the tomb, a beautiful woman with rounded cheeks and red lips, seemingly sleeping on bier
Mariana Enríquez
I came across the bones after a storm that had made a mud puddle out of the patch of soil in my backyard. I put them in a bucket that I used to carry my treasures to the patio faucet, where I would wash them
Camilla Grudova
I have many women friends, and many woo me. One, a rich baron’s wife, had a coat made out of insects’ fur for me. She had hundreds of tarantulas and bees killed in order to make it, in order to appeal to me, but never have I been so repulsed
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
For only now, has it become possible to us, for the first time, to give a serious thought to human happiness. Man is born a rebel, and can rebels be ever happy?… Thou has been fairly warned of it, but evidently to no use, since Thou hast rejected the only means which could make mankind happy

Our Classics

The Priest of Shiga Temple and His Love
Japan
According to Ashin’s “Essentials of Salvation,” the Ten Pleasures are but a drop in the ocean when compared to the joys of the Pure Land. In that Land the earth is made of emerald and the...
The Priest of Shiga Temple and His Love
Yukio Mishima
24 min
The Garden Party
New Zealand
And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled...
The Garden Party
Katherine Mansfield
21 min
The Rocking-Horse Winner
UK
There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck. She married for love, and the love turned to dust. She had bonny children, yet she felt they...
The Rocking-Horse Winner
D.H. Lawrence
21 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
The Invisible Girl
UK
This slender narrative has no pretensions to the regularity of a story, or the development of situations and feelings; it is but a slight sketch, delivered nearly as it was narrated to me by one of...
The Invisible Girl
Mary Shelley
22 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
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
The Real Thing
UK
When the porter’s wife (she used to answer the house-bell), announced “A gentleman—with a lady, sir,” I had, as I often had in those days, for the wish was father to the thought, an immediate vision...
The Real Thing
Henry James
42 min
The Door in the Wall
USA
One confidential evening, not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me this story of the Door in the Wall. And at the time I thought that so far as he was concerned it was a true...
The Door in the Wall
H. G. Wells
27 min
The Dead
Ireland
Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the...
The Dead
James Joyce
62 min

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