Our Collection – The Short Story Project

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

Ukraine

In the department of—but it is better not to mention the department. There is nothing more irritable than departments, regiments, courts of justice, and, in a word, every branch of public service. Each individual attached to...

The Overcoat

Nikolai Gogol

48 min

Germany

South I woke myself up by laughing and couldn’t stop for quite a while, even though from the first moment on I couldn’t remember what I was laughing about. Henri said he once woke up...

Story About Nothing

Peter Glaser

17 min

Germany

No matter whether I really ever said I had no desire to surround myself with nerds, hoarders, bon vivants, and pizza eaters, I can empathize with a good man who one day pays a visit to...

The Old Cable

Max Goldt

4 min

USA

Clemens hated doctors. When he came of age in the late ‘80s, they invariably made him feel worse—even the ones whose off-the-cuff diagnoses and hair-trigger antibiotic prescriptions made him, physically, better. They’d ugly-eye his hacking coughs...

Face

Douglas Silver

30 min

Russia

Semyon Ardalyonovitch said to me all of a sudden the day before yesterday: “Why, will you ever be sober, Ivan Ivanovitch? Tell me that, pray.” A strange requirement. I did not resent it, I am a...

Bobok

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

25 min

Russia

Here once lived a girl who was beloved by her mother but no one else. The girl was used to it and didn’t get too upset. Her name was Oksana – a glamorous, fashionable name —...

Like Penelope

Lyudmila Petrushevskaya

16 min

A Short Story Writer Who doesn’t Obey Army Orders

Palestine

As I was sitting in a taxi stuck in a queue of cars at the Atara Israeli army checkpoint, heading to Nablus to meet a beautiful widow I’d got to know on Facebook, it struck me...

A Short Story Writer Who doesn’t Obey Army Orders

Ziad Khadash

3 min

UK

A Note of Admiration Unless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow. Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed. The poor should be practical...

The Model Millionaire

Oscar Wilde

7 min

Sweden

Sometime in June, my back started to itch. I thought I’d been bitten by a mosquito or some other insect. That’s how it felt. It was always worst when I’d been out running and worked up...

Getting Ahead

Jonas Karlsson

31 min

Colombia

For Carlos, for our hunger As a boy I was hungry, bam. I came home running, jumping, and my mother would say: “Cut it out! Don’t move so much or you’ll be even hungrier,” but...

Like Hunger, Like Love

Giuseppe Caputo

12 min

Sudan

Citizen Jabir Sabeel awoke to the alarm of his Nokia mobile phone at exactly 6:05. He tried, like every morning, to cover his face with a pillow, but he felt an awful weakness. He could not...

Jabir Sabeel

Mansour Mohammad El Souwaim

2 min

Russia

On Thursday Anna found out that she was pregnant. When she came home from work, she didn’t start dinner but instead sat at the tiny kitchen table, put her gaunt hands on the new oilcloth, and...

The Pink Tuber

Vladimir Sorokin

6 min

Israel

I have nothing against fame except for the misguided notion—which people who achieve it often have—that they can remain the same doe-eyed individuals, freely roaming the earth. The only one I have ever met who managed...

Tumbling Towards Absurdity

Linor Katz

9 min

Palestine

I’d only been married six years when I started feeling tired and out of breath, especially when I was going up stairs. At first I thought it was a passing problem that would just go away....

Globalization

Suheil Kiwan

6 min

USA

I made a request of no crying, for I had the grand task of handling the cat. No crying, I said. Do whatever it takes to wait until I’ve gone. He agreed to blame his contact...

Too Huge

Kate Hill Cantrill

8 min

USA

I’ve started grocery shopping at one of the new, big places that takes up an entire city block, but claims to support the environment and our health and world peace and all of that. It’s one...

Produce

Sarah Gerkensmeyer

2 min

Iraq

This vinegar is exactly ninety-nine years old, if the calculations I jotted down on my calendar of motivational quotes are correct, because the perfume was produced exactly a week before the enormous concrete head of Saddam...

The Day By Day Mosque

Mortada Gzar

6 min

Russia

Yasha Hein woke up while it was still dark – long before the alarm clock rang – because of a strange quietness that was filling him up from within. During the evening of the previous day...

Yasha’s Eternity

Anna Starobinets

17 min

Israel

We Weren’t actually at starvation’s door, although even that depends on how you look at it – the house was in ruins, windows missing, the living-room armchair shot to pieces, a crack in the wall, the...

A Thousand Shekels A Story

Orly Castel-Bloom

5 min

Israel

I remember when my breasts developed. I would hold them in my hands, squeeze them in front of the mirror, examining them from every angle. I inspected the color of the nipple, checked for the first...

Breasts

Yoav Katz

27 min

Palestine

(From Letters to the Editor) We chose this letter amongst hundreds of letters that the newspaper receives. The reader preferred to sign his letter with R.A.; he asked for it to be published in the...

R.A. Looks for his Eyes

Sheikha Hussein Helawy

3 min

Russia

I – How to Survive with the Aid of Literature. Astride a Play to Tiflis. If someone asked me what I deserve, I would say in all honesty before God that I deserve hard labor....

Bohemia

Mikhail Bulgakov

9 min

USA

In March I received an invitation to appear at IdiotFest, the second most prestigious event on the entire Idiot circuit. I called my mother. ─IdiotFest? ─Don’t you remember, Mom? It was in San Diego last year....

The Aspiring Idiot

Todd Hasak-Lowy

17 min

Austria

When Markus Kellmer got home from work, he found a naked woman on his living-room carpet. Her dishevelled hair reminded him of the way he had drawn crows’ nests and tree tops as a child; her...

The Corpse

Clemens J. Setz

8 min

Germany

At home, in my flat, in the three neat and prettily decorated rooms belonging to me and nobody but me, lives a little child that torments me. We’re so attached by now that I can’t get...

The Child

Antonia Baum

14 min

Germany

‘From now on, I don’t want to know anything,’ said the man who no longer wanted to know anything. ‘I don’t want to know a thing.’ That’s easily said. It is easily said. And hardly had...

The Man Who No Longer Wanted to Know Anything

Peter Bichsel

5 min

Germany

Date: Mon, August 19 20:41:42-0700 (PDT) From: Henry To: Customer service Re: Your microwave To whom it may concern, I’m writing to you regarding a matter that may seem trivial, even irrelevant at first...

Your Microwave

Philipp Schönthaler

20 min

Italy

The Decameron: Day the Fourth, The Ninth Story SIR GUILLAUME DE ROUSSILLON GIVETH HIS WIFE TO EAT THE HEART OF SIR GUILLAUME DE GUARDESTAING BY HIM SLAIN AND LOVED OF HER, WHICH SHE AFTER COMING TO...

Roussillon’s heart

Giovanni Boccaccio

5 min

Russia

With a leg–tossing military marching step (toes in, heels out, knees to the side, pelvis down), Stasik the mosquito wended his way home. He had asked the veterinarian, Akop the condor, to bandage the spot where...

Like Penelope

Lyudmila Petrushevskaya

2 min

The Decameron: Day the Fifth, The Ninth Story

Italy

FEDERIGO DEGLI ALBERIGHI LOVETH AND IS NOT LOVED. HE WASTETH HIS SUBSTANCE IN PRODIGAL HOSPITALITY TILL THERE IS LEFT HIM BUT ONE SOLE FALCON, WHICH, HAVING NOUGHT ELSE, HE GIVETH HIS MISTRESS TO EAT, ON HER...

The Decameron: Day the Fifth, The Ninth Story

Giovanni Boccaccio

10 min

Hungary

Autumn Translated by Mark Baczoni Sylvester Gács, a forester with the North Hungarian Forestry Service, patrolled the woods (every tree of which he knew by heart), doing the rounds of the pathways he himself had...

One Minute Stories

István Örkény

8 min

Israel

It happened in Guadeloupe, the island that lies in the Pacific ocean. The volcano of Guadeloupe conspired to erupt at any moment. Let the reader take shelter and wait, for what we are concerned with here...

Guadeloupe

Shoham Smith

6 min

Spain

The most beautiful part of the city of Cimannis—a name which the local scholars interpreted as a shortened form of City Magnificent—the first thing that they showed to foreign visitors was the clubhouse; and the most...

Batrachophiles and Batrachophobes

Miguel de Unamuno

7 min

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

Czech Republic

In Mladá Boleslav there lived a stationer called Petiška. He was a man who respected the law and had lived, for longer than anyone could remember, across the road from the barracks. On the Emperor’s birthday...

The Emperor Franz Joseph’s Portrait

Jaroslav Hašek

6 min

Germany

It was the end of January, not long after the Christmas holidays, when the fat girl came to me. That winter I had started lending books to the children from the neighbourhood, who were supposed to...

The Fat Girl

Marie Luise Kaschnitz

10 min

Germany

It was a Wednesday and time for my milk bath. But the light white liquid in angular packs – sucked from udders in farmyards, purloined from bovines, diversely digested from greenest grasses for calves, stirred and...

Milkface

Jan Snela

6 min

Russia

On that terrible day, when the universal injustice was committed and Jesus Christ was crucified in Golgotha among robbers—on that day, from early morning, Ben-Tovit, a tradesman of Jerusalem, suffered from an unendurable toothache. His toothache...

On the Day of the Crucifixion

Leonid Andreyev

5 min

Israel

1. A month before Independence Day, 2048 The Chief Scientist of the Weizmann Institute took a deep breath and turned on the secret switch on the back of the Hitler. The Hitler blinked. And blinked...

Another Love Story

Uzi Weil

11 min

Russia

At 17 Crooked Street there lived an old woman. She had once lived there with her husband and son, but the son grew up and left home, and the husband died, leaving the old woman all...

How the Old Woman Tried to Buy Ink

Daniil Kharms

10 min

El Salvador

I went out because I was invited. I had just showered and was peeking out my bedroom window when, all of a sudden, I saw myself pass by. But it wasn’t the me that I’d just...

Invitation

Claudia Hernández

4 min

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

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

Russia

A Fantastic Story Chapter I I am a ridiculous person. Now they call me a madman. That would be a promotion if it were not that I remain as ridiculous in their eyes as before....

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

34 min

Spain

For Isa and Germán She was going to get married, she said. And then she started to laugh. She’d decided to drop out of university halfway through the year, weren’t expecting that, were we? Sofia...

About the Wedding

Eloy Tizón

10 min

Peru

“You really ought to see it before you go,” said Wordsworth. “It’s not something to be missed. That is, of course, if you dare …” Wordsworth tended to get a little peevish in the early hours...

The Pit

Santiago Roncagliolo

4 min

Argentina

I was in a bus, sitting by the window, looking out at the street. Suddenly a dog started barking very loudly nearby. I tried to see where it was. So did some other passengers. The bus...

The Dog

César Aira

13 min

USA

He had always believed that his immortality would take the form of the Aerojet. The two-stage, solid-fuel boost rocket had been, in its time, one of the crowning achievements of human technology — the first apparatus to...

The Northeast Kingdom

Nathaniel Rich

41 min

Israel

In 1999, my father moved into a studio apartment with sea views in the Colony Beach Apartment Motel, Bat Yam promenade. He did this to get away from the distractions in his Ramat Aviv neighbourhood and dedicate himself...

Notes from the Municipal Archives

Yonathan Raz Portugali

16 min

Israel

It’s done, I got the final punishment. It seems that way. I can see and hear; there’s no need to prove it. Surely that must mean something. I’ll soon report what I see and hear. There:...

The Monkey

Boaz Izraeli

10 min

Israel

Boaz called out to Chicko: “I saw those in the Golan, waiting for hot air to come so they can fly, be birds.” He was stretched out on the couch, watching a TV show about animal...

Saragossa in Berlin

Iftach Alony

8 min

France

Only after a few episodes did I notice him. He was trying to force the door to a rundown house at the corner of a derelict street. He was too far away to pick out his...

The Man in the Yellow Parka

Thierry Horguelin

16 min

Poland

The sand was everywhere. Not just under the miserable bed or in his bowl. It was in his eyes too, the pores of his skin, under his fingernails and in his hair. Sometimes he felt as...

Abulafia

Paweł Huelle

7 min