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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

Two Brothers
Russia
Trees cannot talk and they stand as if riveted to the spot, but they are alive nonetheless.  They’re breathing. They keep growing for as long as they live. Even enormous old-man trees – they grow a...
Two Brothers
Evgeny Schwartz
23 min
The Blue Cross
UK
Between the silver ribbon of morning and the green glittering ribbon of sea, the boat touched Harwich and let loose a swarm of folk like flies, among whom the man we must follow was by no...
The Blue Cross
G.K. Chesterton
29 min
Of the Coming of John
USA
Carlisle Street runs westward from the centre of Johnstown, across a great black bridge, down a hill and up again, by little shops and meat–markets, past single–storied homes, until suddenly it stops against a wide green...
Of the Coming of John
W. E. B. Du Bois
23 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
Rain
UK
It was nearly bed-time and when they awoke next morning land would be in sight. Dr. Macphail lit his pipe and, leaning over the rail, searched the heavens for the Southern Cross. After two years at...
The Feather Pillow
Uruguay
Alicia’s entire honeymoon gave her hot and cold shivers. A blonde, angelic, and timid young girl, the childish fancies she had dreamed about being a bride had been chilled by her husband’s rough character. She loved...
The Feather Pillow
Horacio Quiroga
5 min
The Ransom of Red Chief
USA
It looked like a good thing: but wait till I tell you. We were down South, In Alabama—Bill Driscoll and myself—when this kidnapping idea struck us. It was, as Bill afterward expressed it, “during a moment...
The Ransom of Red Chief
O. Henry
16 min
The Little Match Girl
Denmark
Most terribly cold it was; it snowed, and was nearly quite dark, and evening – the last evening of the year. In this cold and darkness there went along the street a poor little girl, bareheaded,...
The Little Match Girl
Hans Christian Andersen
4 min
To Build a Fire
USA
Day had broken cold and grey, exceedingly cold and grey, when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail and climbed the high earth-bank, where a dim and little-travelled trail led eastward through the fat...
To Build a Fire
Jack London
28 min
El Verdugo
France
To Martinez de la Rosa.   The clock of the little town of Menda had just struck midnight. At that moment a young French officer, leaning on the parapet of a long terrace which bordered the...
El Verdugo
Honoré de Balzac
11 min

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