Our Collection – The Short Story Project

Denmark

Far out in the sea the water is as blue as the petals of the loveliest of cornflowers, and as clear as the clearest glass; but it is very deep, deeper than any anchor-cable can reach,...

The Little Mermaid

Hans Christian Andersen

36 min

UK

The statue of the Happy Prince stood high above the city. It was covered with gold, its eyes were bright blue jewels, and a red jewel hung from its waist. Everyone thought that it was very...

The Happy Prince

Oscar Wilde

7 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

Russia

In the cemetery above a fresh mound of earth stands a new cross of oak⁠—strong, heavy, smooth, a pleasant thing to look at. It is April, but the days are grey. From a long way off...

Gentle Breathing

Ivan Bunin

9 min

Israel

I was assigned to work with Guy at Bells. We were both freshmen. He was in a prestigious social sciences program that I’d also applied to. I got a 655 on the psychometric exam, which was...

Bells

Yam Traiber

13 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

In the latter part of the last century there lived a man of science, an eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy, who not long before our story opens had made experience of a spiritual...

The Birthmark

Nathaniel Hawthorne

25 min

USA

I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library. Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified. He said,...

Wants

Grace Paley

3 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

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

Spain

I DO not know whether this is history which seems like a tale, or a tale which seems like history; what I can affirm is that in its core it contains a truth, a truth supremely...

THE RAY OF MOONSHINE

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

10 min

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

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

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

Israel

Sometimes strangers come visit, friends of yours, parents themselves. I don’t have any problem with that, let them come, you have every right to invite them. But as long as they do, why do they have...

It was nice not to meet you

Ofir Oz

4 min

USA

It’s still dark when the weeping erupts, so Mather knows it’s early. How early he isn’t sure, but he won’t be able to fall back asleep, so it doesn’t matter. He pulls the extra pillow over...

Rollingwood

Ben Marcus

30 min

Japan

One morning, after a fall of snow. Yasukichi sat on a chair in the physics teachers’ lounge, watching the flames in the heating stove. The flames licked up yellow one moment, then fell to sooty ruins...

The Cold

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

7 min

Libya

I . . . am a cheap sock, I cost half a dinar. An industrial cooperative manufactured me, and my profit margin was redistributed among the elements of production. An ordinary man bought me, a manual...

The Story of a Sock

Muhammad al-Asfar

3 min

Israel

“Ana bahib al-bahar”, I love the sea, the girl said. They were walking, stumbling along on the sand, four children and one grown woman. Backs, shoulders and hands were laden with backpacks and bags, the woman’s...

Seeing them see the sea

Ilana Hammerman

8 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

Canada

Diamond Cut Diamond EMILY, who had been pointedly ignored by the Murrays at breakfast, was called into the parlour when the meal was over. They were all there—the whole phalanx of them—and it occurred to Emily...

Emily Of New Moon – Chapter 5

Lucy Maud Montgomery

10 min

Russia

It was an immense city in which they lived: Petrov, clerk in a commercial bank, and he, the other,—name unknown. They used to meet once a year, at Easter, when they both went to pay a...

The City

Leonid Andreyev

11 min

Tunisia

Emerging from his plastic cave awash in filth, Crow “J” toddled unsteadily over to the paved road with sullen, terse gasps. The radiant disk was rising from the mouth of the earth as he advanced through...

One of Them

Aziz Jamal Yahyawi

2 min

Canada

Chapter I The House in the Hollow The house in the hollow was “a mile from anywhere”—so Maywood people said. It was situated in a grassy little dale, looking as if it had never been built...

Emily of New Moon

Lucy Maud Montgomery

10 min

Canada

A Watch in the Night Emily stood quite still and looked up at Ellen’s broad, red face–as still as if she had been suddenly turned to stone. She felt as if she had. She was as...

Emily of New Moon – Chapter 2

Lucy Maud Montgomery

15 min

Canada

A Hop Out of Kin Douglas Starr lived two weeks more. In after years when the pain had gone out of their recollection, Emily thought they were the most precious of her memories. They were beautiful...

Emily of New Moon – Chapter 3

Lucy Maud Montgomery

17 min

Canada

A Family Conclave EMILY wakened at daylight the next morning. Through her low, uncurtained window the splendour of the sunrise was coming in, and one faint, white star was still lingering in the crystal-green sky over...

Emily from New Moon – Chapter 4

Lucy Maud Montgomery

13 min

Israel

Like at other periods of metaphysical ardor, at this time too, the body (that of a woman, to be sure) wasn’t taken very seriously. This may be why even the dockworkers in the port that day...

Madame Bovary from Neveh Tsedek

Nurit Zarchi

10 min

Syria

I learned of the character of drugs and the nature of poisons from an alchemist – an Arab alchemist from the outskirts of Baghdad who had come to work as a physician in the palace of...

The Veiled Man

Jan Dost

6 min

Israel

I had headed out to buy a pack of cigarettes and a few tomatoes, and there was a black shoe in the entrance to the building. A black shoe, just one, on the second tile beyond...

The Shoe

Hisham Naffa

5 min

Argentina

Mojito sniffs through the bars of the gate. He gets bored and comes back with muddy feet. I pet his fur. The color of tea with milk, Brenda says, as the dog licks my hands. ...

The Next Soviet Union

Martín Felipe Castagnet

11 min

The Enigmatic Crime of the Signals Private

Iraq

Gentlemen, my name is Jamal Ahmad. I work as a signals private in Forward Reconnaissance Unit 312, engaging the American enemy in the south. I confess in your presence, and I am of sound mind,...

The Enigmatic Crime of the Signals Private

Ali Badr

7 min

Iraq

The waiter at the Café Au Chai de l’Abbaye, Claude, asked me to finish my drink quickly. It was a quarter past two in the morning and he had to close up the café. I walked...

Two Royalists in Quatorze Juillet (a chapter from “An Iraqi in Paris”)

Samuel Shimon

19 min

Spain

The tie is doomed, just as the larger Asian elephant is doomed. Manuel Vilas 8 January 2018 I can’t stand them. I’d burn them in a dirty flame, a diesel flame, no sandalwood or ceremony...

My Father’s Ties

Recaredo Veredas

9 min

Sweden

I was intending to paint a picture of David as the Shepherd, but nowhere could I find a suitable model for the face; there were several white and ruddy,’ but none which had on them the impress...

Hylas

Eric Stenbock

12 min

Sudan

The sands lolled and swam in the sun’s blazing rays all day, then when darkness fell, they patiently waited for the sun to rise. As far as the eye could see, the sands swelled in every...

The Route through Purgatory

Omayma Abdullah

7 min

Syria

Hadiya would visit us with her mother. On sunny days, we did our homework together under the grapevine; in winter, we did it by the stove. Her books were often torn: she didn’t like books or...

River of Honey, Lake of Milk

Ahmed Omar

5 min

Palestine

I could smell the stench of death. From the first shades of darkness, I smelt the stench of death. A stench above me, a stench below me. Wherever I turned, I smelt the same stench. A...

Nightly Lament

Naji Daher

5 min

Tunisia

“These cities have devoured you,” he said as he pulled out the chair and sat down in the middle of the cramped room. He lit his pipe with a lighter that looked almost like a pen....

The Visit

Unknown Author

6 min

The Mother of all Defiance – Fourth Place

USA

Mom gave me a block of cheddar cheese and a sleeve of Fig Newtons when I left home for California in August of 1983. Apparently back then, when crossing the country alone in an unreliable foreign...

The Mother of all Defiance – Fourth Place

Mimi Broihier

9 min

Israel

I remember a tree. Its crown awning the path. I remember a large trunk, thicker than any I had seen before. I remember roots cleaving the black earth, bursting it asunder, like snakes fighting free and...

Close to the Body – Fifth Place

Sarit Elkon

9 min

Israel

High up, stretching into the sky, loomed the tower of the fair princess. It was made of pure crystal and its pinnacle was bedecked with gold and precious stones. All around it, a multi-hued, large rose...

The Rose Garden (A Fairy Tale)

Lea Goldberg

7 min

Sweden

When Dad’s eyelids drop like a guillotine she pulls the car door shut with a click. He turns his gaze to the road, and from her shady spot in the backseat she can only see his...

The Father Hole

Andrea Lundgren

32 min

Germany

We used to jump, Lydia and I, as high and as often as we could, hands high over our heads, wearing colourful dresses, our knees pulled up, our feet in stout shoes we were allowed to...

Lydia

Zsuzsa Bánk

10 min

Israel

On dark, stormy nights they would run through the sleeping streets, burning torches in their hands, and no one saw their faces and no one knew their names. And the echoes of the steps of fourteen...

Autumn (A Fairy Tale)

Lea Goldberg

3 min

Canada

I thought that Mr. Purnell was a little young to be a funeral director, but he had the look down cold. In the instant between his warm, dry handshake and my taking my hand back to...

By His Things Shall You Know Him

Cory Doctorow

20 min

USA

Years ago, Aunt Renata squeezed a picture into my hand when my mother wasn’t looking. Aunt Renata wasn’t really my aunt, but rather someone to whom my mother had clung like a sister, like blood. In...

Waltz on East 6th Street

Tehila Lieberman

11 min

Sudan

It was her panting that drew me over. I was exhausted, as the new work regime had been sucking every last drop of life out of us. But my misreading of the situation (what with the...

Birth

Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin

3 min

USA

Ginny stood on the counter of the diner decorated in tinfoil. She’s my wife, if you want to call her that, which I do. She’d made bracelets and earrings and a fake-fancy necklace by folding and...

Riding to the Shore

Liz Prato

17 min

Iraq

I don’t think we did go blind, I think we are blind, blind but seeing, blind people who can see, but do not see. José Saramago Saeed, drunk, opened the door. The rabbit hopped inside....

Rabbits of Baghdad

Raghad al-Suheil

11 min

Israel

I can’t recall when I first started scribbling those little notes I later stashed in various hiding places around the apartment. It sure as hell could not have been a lot earlier, because at the time...

Sunflowers

Michal Yaara Carmi

3 min

Russia

Most of all I hate the sun, loud human voices, and pounding. Rapid, rapid pounding. I am so afraid of people that if I hear someone else’s footsteps and the sound of voices in the corridor...

The Red Crown

Mikhail Bulgakov

8 min