Our Collection – Page 3 – The Short Story Project

USA

Here in the city lives a prince whose left arm is like any other man’s and whose right arm is a swan’s wing. He and his eleven brothers were turned into swans by their vituperative stepmother,...

A Wild Swan

Michael Cunningham

5 min

USA

Translated from the Original SATURDAY. – I am almost a whole day old, now. I arrived yesterday. That is as it seems to me. And it must be so, for if there was a day-before-yesterday...

Eve’s Diary

Mark Twain

12 min

The Spirit of Madame de Genlis (A Spiritualistic Occurrence)

Russia

“It is sometimes much easier to call up a spirit than to get rid of it.” – A. B. CALMET I The strange adventure I intend to tell took place several years ago, and can now...

The Spirit of Madame de Genlis (A Spiritualistic Occurrence)

Nikolai Leskov

17 min

China

A certain Mr. Ts’ui, of Lin-ch’ing, was too poor to keep his garden walls in repair, and used often to find a strange horse lying down on the grass inside. It was a black horse marked...

The Picture Horse

Pu Sung-ling

2 min

Germany

Later in the night he saw, strangely, the picture of himself as he had been before she came. He thought: ‘She has power to wake the dead.’ –Karen Blixen, “Tempests” Airport, present day, night-time In...

The Beautiful Thieves

Martin Kluger

15 min

Canada

These notes were found in a leather binder, written on loose-leaf paper of good quality. The binder was stuffed in an old trunk, underneath a moth-eaten fox fur, small black records, many broken needles, tattered bits...

Notes From a Spider

Camilla Grudova

16 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

Jacob Wallenstein, Notes for a Future Biography

Israel

Faster than light space travel to distant galaxies has been proven impossible. The existence of other planets or alien races, therefore, remains mere conjecture as these cannot be reached or contacted. Miraculous machines that let you...

Jacob Wallenstein, Notes for a Future Biography

Shay Azoulay

10 min

France

“I had loved her madly! Why does one love? Why does one love? How queer it is to see only one being in the world, to have only one thought in one’s mind, only one desire...

Was It a Dream?

Guy de Maupassant

7 min

Argentina

My name is Tomás. I’m thirty years old. I live with my father. We’re two bachelors in a big house who run into each other at odd hours and treat one another with respect, but we...

The Song We Sang Every Day

Luciano Lamberti

9 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

UK

At last the revenants became so troublesome the peasants abandoned the village and it fell solely into the possession of subtle and vindictive inhabitants who manifest their presences by shadows that fall almost imperceptibly awry, too...

The Lady of the House of Love

Angela Carter

27 min

UK

It was the middle of November when we arrived at Martingdale, and found the place anything but romantic or pleasant. The walks were wet and sodden, the trees were leafless, there were no flowers save a...

A Strange Christmas Game

Charlotte Riddell

7 min

Israel

Lacking any alternative image, we turn to the moment of creation. The form bursting from the awkwardness of matter. No, not the awkwardness, the indifference towards being. This time, I am ready; this time, I’ve prepared....

Ishmael

Shimon Adaf

7 min

Israel

Francesca, a leggy young woman with a blue streak running through her thick mane of hair, crossed the park quickly. The dry leaves on the path crackled pleasantly beneath her feet. The scent of roasted chestnuts...

The Enemy of the Love Story

Alma Ganihar

17 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

UK

The alien parked its car across the street and came and sat down in the waiting room. He must have seen this happen, peripherally. But he was busy settling the bill with a middle-aged woman with...

The Universe of Things

Gwyneth Jones

17 min

Israel

Paul Nimoro was Japanese. He was many things; but above all, he was Japanese and he valued the qualities he knew he had inherited‒ precision, self-discipline and along with them, perhaps less visible but still present...

Dune

Dorit Peleg

13 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

The day the Chinese army invaded, my brother moved in with us. He came straight after they had laid down their arms and surrendered Jerusalem. It was only a formal act of surrender as our army...

The Chinese

Uri Orlev

15 min

Germany

Let’s see if the forests catch fire again. Let’s see if intense heat rushes toward us. Let’s see if smoke drives animals whose names we don’t know out of the bushes. Let’s see if that leaves...

The Onlookers

Kathrin Röggla

19 min

USA

THE GRANDMOTHERS — dozens of them — find themselves at sea. They do not know how they got there. It seems to be afternoon, the glare from the sun keeps them squinting. They wander carefully, canes...

Safe Passage

Ramona Ausubel

15 min

USA

It was a day of holocausts, cataclysms, tornadoes, earthquakes, blackouts, mass murders, eruptions, and miscellaneous dooms, at the peak of which the sun swallowed the earth and the stars vanished. But to put it simply, the...

No News, or What Killed the Dog?

Ray Bradbury

9 min