Our Collection – The Short Story Project

USA

There is a merry jangle of bells in the air, an all-pervading sense of jester’s noise, and the flaunting vividness of royal colours. The streets swarm with humanity,–humanity in all shapes, manners, forms, laughing, pushing, jostling,...

A Carnival Jangle

Alice Dunbar-Nelson

4 min

USA

I. “And she tied a bunch of violets with a tress of her pretty brown hair.” She sat in the yellow glow of the lamplight softly humming these words. It was Easter evening, and the newly...

Violets

Alice Dunbar-Nelson

2 min

USA

When Miss Sophie knew consciousness again, the long, faint, swelling notes of the organ were dying away in distant echoes through the great arches of the silent church, and she was alone, crouching in a little,...

Little Miss Sophie

Alice Dunbar-Nelson

9 min

USA

Sister Josepha told her beads mechanically, her fingers numb with the accustomed exercise. The little organ creaked a dismal “O Salutaris,” and she still knelt on the floor, her white-bonneted head nodding suspiciously. The Mother Superior...

Sister Josepha

Alice Dunbar-Nelson

9 min

USA

I. THE LAND OF RED APPLES. There were eight in our party of bronzed children who were going East with the missionaries. Among us were three young braves, two tall girls, and we three little ones,...

The School Days of an Indian Girl

Zitkala-Ša

24 min

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

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

UK

“Forthwith this frame of mine was wrench’d With a woful agony, Which forced me to begin my tale, And then it set me free. “Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns; And till my...

Transformation

Mary Shelley

27 min

UK

July 16, 1833.—This is a memorable anniversary for me; on it I complete my three hundred and twenty-third year! The Wandering Jew?—certainly not. More than eighteen centuries have passed over his head. In comparison with him,...

The Mortal Immortal

Mary Shelley

21 min

UK

On my fourteenth birthday, My Hunger stepped out of my body and sat beside me at my party. She looked me up and down before wrapping both hands around my red velvet cake and whispered “Well,...

Disappearing Acts

Amanda Miles

8 min

UK

“Deceived in Freindship and Betrayed in Love.” LETTER the FIRST From ISABEL to LAURA How often, in answer to my repeated intreaties that you would give my Daughter a regular detail of the Misfortunes and...

Love and Freindship

Jane Austen

42 min

UK

Letter the first To Miss Webster My dear Amelia You will rejoice to hear of the return of my amiable Brother from abroad. He arrived on thursday, & never did I see a finer form, save...

Amelia Webster

Jane Austen

1 min

UK

a novel in twelve Chapters. dedicated by permission to Miss Austen. Dedication. Madam You are a Phoenix. Your taste is refined, your Sentiments are noble, & your Virtues innumerable. Your Person is lovely, your Figure, elegant,...

The beautifull Cassandra

Jane Austen

1 min

USA

When I was eighteen I wanted something to do. I had tried teaching for two years, and hated it; I had tried sewing, and could not earn my bread in that way, at the cost of...

How I Went Out to Service

Louisa May Alcott

23 min

USA

Doctor Franck came in as I sat sewing up the rents in an old shirt, that Tom might go tidily to his grave. New shirts were needed for the living, and there was not wife or...

The Brothers

Louisa May Alcott

33 min

USA

When the call came I remember that I turned from the tele- phone in a romantic flutter. Though I had spoken only once to the great surgeon, Roland Maradick, I felt on that December afternoon that...

The Shadowy Third

Ellen Glasgow

39 min

USA

I had no sooner entered the house than I knew something was wrong. Though I had never been in so splendid a place before—it was one of those big houses just off Fifth Avenue—I had a...

The Past

Ellen Glasgow

39 min

USA

Twilights were wonderful just after the war. They hung above New York like indigo wash, forming themselves from asphalt dust and sooty shadows under the cornices and limp gusts of air exhaled from closing windows, to...

A Millionaire’s Girl

Zelda Fitzgerald

18 min

USA

The summer of 1924 shriveled the trees in the Champs-Elysees to a misty blue till they swayed before your eyes as if they were about to go down under the gasoline fumes. Before July was out,...

A Couple Of Nuts

Zelda Fitzgerald

19 min

USA

Bitter things dried behind the eyes of Miss Ella like garlic on a string before an open fire. The acrid fumes of sweet memories had gradually reddened their rims until at times they shone like the...

Miss Ella

Zelda Fitzgerald

11 min

USA

“Don’t tell me!” said old Mis’ Briggs, with a forbidding shake of the head; “no mother that was a mother would desert her own child for anything on earth!” “And leaving it a care on the...

The Unnatural Mother

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

12 min

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

New Zealand

Getting ready was a terrible business. After supper Frau Brechenmacher packed four of the five babies to bed, allowing Rosa to stay with her and help to polish the buttons of Herr Brechenmacher’s uniform. Then she...

Frau Brechenmacher Attends A Wedding

Katherine Mansfield

9 min

New Zealand

I think it must be the umbrellas which make us look ridiculous. When I was admitted into the enclosure for the first time, and saw my fellow-bathers walking about very nearly “in their nakeds,” it struck...

The Luft Bad

Katherine Mansfield

4 min

USA

It was a Negro yard around a Negro house in a Negro settlement that looked to the payroll of the G. and G. Fertilizer works for its support. But there was something happy about the...

The Gilded Six-Bits

Zora Neale Hurston

18 min

UK

People are accustomed to think of Somerset as a country of deep, bosky bays, sunny coves, woods, moorlands, but Hemerton was in itself sufficient to blur this bland illusion. It lay a mile and a half...

Hodge

Elinor Mordaunt

31 min

USA

A giant of a brown-skinned man sauntered up the one street of the Village and out into the palmetto thickets with a small pretty woman clinging lovingly to his arm. “Looka theah, folkses!” cried Elijah Mosley,...

Spunk

Zora Neale Hurston

8 min

USA

It was eleven o’clock of a Spring night in Florida. It was Sunday. Any other night, Delia Jones would have been in bed for two hours by this time. But she was a wash-woman, and...

Sweat

Zora Neale Hurston

18 min

Germany

In summer, during the season, he works from sunrise to sunset. Drives to work at dawn, comes back at dusk. It’s beautiful; the drive takes exactly as long as the sun rising and setting. They set...

Lost in the Forest

Terézia Mora

20 min

USA

After Guadalupe Nettel’s “Fungus” With my big toe, I pressed down on the bloated bulb of seaweed until a burst of salt air and ocean water popped out of its membrane. Amalia refused to do the...

Fungus

Mia Carrillo

5 min

USA

When I’m feeling down, I go for nighttime swims with the aquarium turtles. I was hired as a security guard because people keep trying to steal our very expensive penguins. In my opinion, the sea turtles...

Aquarium’s Most Wanted

Sophie Hoss

0 min

USA

8:44 am Tuesday greets me with pale golden light, singing the song of the morning, the song of opportunity. I rise from my bed without using the snooze button even once, ready to meet the promise...

Cuddlebug

Jenna-Marie Warnecke

25 min

Israel

A pregnant woman lays naked in a bathtub filled with amber water. She has a serene yet intense expression, with her eyes slightly open and her head tilted back. The lighting is warm and moody. It...

By the Water with Friends

Danielle Zilberberg

7 min

Canada

When she woke in the morning there beside her was the boy she had dismissed the night before as far too ugly and ingratiating, and on the other side, even more of a surprise, the boy...

The Girl Who Planted Flowers

Sheila Heti

2 min

New Zealand

Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up...

Bliss

Katherine Mansfield

18 min

USA

The room blazed with color. It seemed that the gorgeous things which the women were wearing had for this once managed to subdue the strident tones of the inevitable black and white of the men’s costumes....

The Wrong Man

Nella Larsen

6 min

New Zealand

When she opened the door and saw him standing there she was more pleased than ever before, and he, too, as he followed her into the studio, seemed very very happy to have come. “Not busy?”...

Psychology

Katherine Mansfield

10 min

UK

3:34 am. She was awake. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness of the bedroom. She could make out every familiar feature. In recent months, this time had become too familiar to her. She no longer...

Nocturnal Yearnings

Naomi Nightingale

3 min

USA

It was the 15th of the August of 1999, the morning before the wedding of Benjamin Kern and Maitreya Scheffer, ceremony and celebration to be hosted by the bride’s parents at their home in Bethel, Vermont,...

Are You Enjoying Your Forgiveness?

Julia May Jonas

31 min

Spain

That’s the way life is: you push a button, and life turns on. —Clarice Lispector Leonora and Adelino were an old-fashioned couple. They had just turned eighty, and they shook with fear when they blew...

Eclipse

Almudena Sánchez

14 min

Israel

I knew that Hertz and his wife could not possibly be home at this hour. I even had a note ready in my purse: “Came by but found you were out. So sorry. Shoshana”. It was...

A Duty Call

Lea Goldberg

4 min

Spain

There’s a theory, quite well-known but difficult to prove, about the psychic powers of animals. Of most animals. How they can sense magnetic fields, electrical fluctuations, pregnancies, divorces, how they predict full moons. How, breathless, transfixed,...

Señora Smaig

Almudena Sánchez

14 min

USA

At noon, the aftermath of lovemaking, I was still wandering around the apartment naked, makeup smeared beneath my eyes. I messaged Sarah: Come to meeting with me. Her reply: I don’t need that stupid shit. I’d...

Summer of Fun

Kirie Pedersen

18 min

Israel

The summer I fell in love with AI was also the summer I fell in love with N, and the two weren’t unrelated. Early that summer, a machine N had built kept popping up in my...

Perpetuum Mobile

Zohar Elmakias

4 min

USA

Eight or nine years ago – I think it was summer 2012 – I found myself browsing the shelves at a bookstore in Tehran. Outposts of the local bookstore chain Shahr-e Ketab glitter like branches of...

The Translator I Never Wanted to Be

Mariam Rahmani

13 min

Japan

My husband emerged from the bedroom, woken by the beeps at the end of the washing-machine cycle. ‘Morning . . . Sorry I overslept. Shall I take over?’ The weekend laundry was his job, but since...

A Clean Marriage

Sayaka Murata

20 min

Spain

On the Night of San Juan, Nana built a gigantic ﬁre. She built it in the middle of the garden, and it was several metres tall. On the Night of San Juan, you couldn’t breathe for...

Dogs of Summer

Andrea Abreu

12 min

Denmark

When Britta was depressed, nervous, and restless like this, so not even a complete reorganization of all the furniture in the house, or the preparation of a complicated dinner, could help her, there were only two...

Two Women

Tove Ditlevsen

7 min

USA

When I came back to Tucson for Christmas break, my mom was like, “You need to clean out your closet or you’re not going anywhere.” This was her way of being dumb about the fact that...

She’s not quite woman’s best friend

KILEY REID

10 min

Israel

To Tami Berger In the corner café that had recently changed owners stood a parrot’s cage. A green cage with a domed top, a swing fixed inside it, and a slot and small drawer at the...

A Girl in the Café

Ronit Matalon

30 min

Slovakia

She had been married for five years – and still nothing. Her relatives felt pity and compassion for her; it was not usual for women to be barren in her large family, where children had always...

A Child

Erika Olahová

5 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 Black Dancer in a One-person Dance Company

Israel

While I was waiting for Eriksson, I decided to get rid of all my meds. I packed them in clear garbage bags and went downstairs to the trashcan, my hands full of Lomotil, Hismanal, Diazepam, Ampicillin,...

A Black Dancer in a One-person Dance Company

Esty G. Haim

14 min

Israel

When everything in the house is upside down and all mixed up, it means only one thing: we’ve got company. It doesn’t matter how many guests there are — one or thirty-one — before their arrival,...

Being Frosya Shneerson (Chapter 6)

Tasha Karluka

8 min