Our Collection
Our Collection

Read & Listen
to 1,736
Curated
Short Stories

5 min
10 min
15 min

Editor’s Choice ♉

What’s new?

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

There Was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard
UK
This, you know, is the beginning of the story about sprites and goblins which Mamilius, the best child in Shakespeare, was telling to his mother the queen, and the court ladies, when the king came in...
There Was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard
M.R. James
5 min
The Deer in the Dream
China
A man was gathering fuel in the Cheng State when he fell in with a deer that had been startled from its usual haunts. He gave chase, and succeeded in killing it. He was overjoyed at...
The Deer in the Dream
Lieh Tzu
2 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
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
The Fall of the House of Usher
USA
“Son coeur est un luth suspendu; Sitôt qu’on le touche il rèsonne.” – De Béranger.   During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung...
The Fall of the House of Usher
Edgar Allan Poe
28 min
The Blue Hotel
USA
The Palace Hotel at Fort Romper was painted a light blue, a shade that is on the legs of a kind of heron, causing the bird to declare its position against any background. The Palace Hotel,...
The Blue Hotel
Stephen Crane
42 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
Poverty | The Galosh
Russia
Poverty   Brothers, what is the most fashionable word these days, eh? These days the most fashionable word around is, of course, “electrification”. I don’t deny the vast importance of shining a light on Soviet Russia....
Poverty | The Galosh
Mikhail Zoshchenko
6 min
The Invisible Man
UK
In the cool blue twilight of two steep streets in Camden Town, the shop at the corner, a confectioner’s, glowed like the butt of a cigar. One should rather say, perhaps, like the butt of a...
The Invisible Man
G.K. Chesterton
25 min
Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment
USA
That very singular man old Dr. Heidegger once invited four venerable friends to meet him in his study. There were three white-bearded gentlemen—Mr. Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew and Mr. Gascoigne—and a withered gentlewoman whose name was the...
Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment
Nathaniel Hawthorne
14 min

Get the Full Story!

Subscribe and enjoy unlimited access to the library. Listen to audio editions and playlists.
Support writers, translators and editors.

Get Full Access
Skip to content