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Short Stories

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Me, The Other, and My Mother
Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin
6 min
http://Me,%20The%20Other,%20and%20My%20Mother
Sudan
I am fifty now—the same age my mother was when...
Love and Freindship
Jane Austen
42 min
http://Love%20and%20Freindship
UK
“Deceived in Freindship and Betrayed in Love.”   LETTER the...
Disappearing Acts
Amanda Miles
8 min
http://Disappearing%20Acts
UK
On my fourteenth birthday, My Hunger stepped out of my...
The Invisible Girl
Mary Shelley
22 min
http://The%20Invisible%20Girl
UK
This slender narrative has no pretensions to the regularity of...

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

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
Rosso Malpello
Italy
They called him Malpelo, which means ‘evil-haired,’ because he had red hair: and he had red hair because he was a bad, malicious boy, with every promise of growing up into a first-rate rascal. And so all...
Rosso Malpello
Giovanni Carmelo Verga
16 min
Philomel Cottage
UK
“Good-bye, darling.” “Good-bye, sweetheart.” Alix Martin stood leaning over the small rustic gate, watching the retreating figure of her husband, as he walked down the road in the direction of the village. Presently he turned a...
Philomel Cottage
Agatha Christie
31 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 Marble Child
UK
All over the pavement of the church spread the exaggerated cross-hatching of the old pews’ oak, a Smithfield market of intersecting lines such as children made with cards in the old days when kings and knaves...
The Marble Child
Edith Nesbit
14 min
A Drama in the Air
France
  In the month of September, 185–, I arrived at Frankfort-on-the-Maine. My passage through the principal German cities had been brilliantly marked by balloon ascents; but as yet no German had accompanied me in my car,...
A Drama in the Air
Jules Verne
27 min
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
In Another Country
USA
In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came...
In Another Country
Ernest Hemingway
8 min
Two Collectors
UK
The delight of his youth had become the burden of his old age. Forty years ago Wormald desired nothing better than to spend a whole day in book-hunting. Regardless of fatigue and of shoe-leather, he tramped...
Two Collectors
George Gissing
5 min
Rashōmon
Japan
It was a chilly evening. A servant of a samurai stood under the Rashōmon, waiting for a break in the rain. No one else was under the wide gate. On the thick column, its crimson lacquer...
Rashōmon
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
8 min

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