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Short Stories

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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!...
The Most Forgettable Murder
Nahar Trina
5 min
http://The%20Most%20Forgettable%20Murder
USA
“Oh no! What a disaster!”   The piercing cry of...

Short Stories from around the world  |

Short Stories from around the world  |

Short Stories from around the world  |

Hidden Gems

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 Nose
Ukraine
I On the 25th March, 18——, a very strange occurrence took place in St Petersburg. On the Ascension Avenue there lived a barber of the name of Ivan Jakovlevitch. He had lost his family name, and...
The Nose
Nikolai Gogol
36 min
Five Girls
USA
“There won’t be many more such good times as these for us,” said Olive Sargent, mournfully hugging her knees as she sat on the floor under the big Victory; “we’ve got to go out into the...
Five Girls
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
5 min
The Birthmark
USA
In the latter part of the last century there lived a man of science, an eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy, who not long before our story opens had made experience of a spiritual...
The Birthmark
Nathaniel Hawthorne
25 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 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
A White Heron
USA
The woods were already filled with shadows one June evening, just before eight o’clock, though a bright sunset still glimmered faintly among the trunks of the trees. A little girl was driving home her cow, a...
A White Heron
Sarah Orne Jewett
16 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

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
Bernice Bobs Her Hair
After dark on Saturday night one could stand on the first tee of the golf-course and see the country-club windows as a yellow expanse over a very black and wavy ocean. The waves of this ocean,...
Bernice Bobs Her Hair
F. Scott Fitzgerald
35 min
How I Met the Author of My Obituary
Czech Republic
In the course of the five or six years I spent in Russia I was several times killed and liquidated by various organizations and individuals. When I returned home to Czechoslovakia I found I had been...
How I Met the Author of My Obituary
Jaroslav Hašek
4 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
An Unexpected Bender | The Cashier
Russia
An Unexpected Bender One day Antonina Alekseevna struck her husband with a rubber stamp and smeared his forehead with ink. The deeply offended Pyotr Leonidovich, Antonina Alekseevna’s husband, locked himself in the bathroom and wouldn’t let...
An Unexpected Bender | The Cashier
Daniil Kharms
5 min
They Have Given Us The Land
Mexico
After walking for so many hours without coming upon even the shadow of a tree, not even the seed of a tree, not even a root of anything, you can hear dogs barking. You might sometimes...
They Have Given Us The Land
Juan Rulfo
6 min
A Modest Proposal
Ireland
For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick.   It is a melancholy object to those, who walk...
A Modest Proposal
Jonathan Swift
10 min
The Remarkable Rocket
UK
The King’s son was going to be married, so there were general rejoicings. He had waited a whole year for his bride, and at last she had arrived. She was a Russian Princess, and had driven...
The Remarkable Rocket
Oscar Wilde
17 min
An Unwritten Novel
UK
Such an expression of unhappiness was enough by itself to make one’s eyes slide above the paper’s edge to the poor woman’s face—insignificant without that look, almost a symbol of human destiny with it. Life’s what...
An Unwritten Novel
Virginia Woolf
17 min
The Pit and the Pendulum
USA
Impia tortorum longos hic turba furores Sanguinis innocui, non satiata, aluit. Sospite nunc patria, fracto nunc funeris antro, Mors ubi dira fuit vita salusque patent.   [Quatrain composed for the gates of a market to be...
The Pit and the Pendulum
Edgar Allan Poe
24 min

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