English
0 min 70 min
How I Met the Author of My Obituary
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
The Emperor Franz Joseph’s Portrait
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
The Prophetic Pictures
USA
“But this painter!” cried Walter Ludlow, with animation. “He not only excels in his peculiar art, but possesses vast acquirements in all other learning and science. He talks Hebrew with Dr. Mather and gives lectures in...
The Prophetic Pictures
Nathaniel Hawthorne
20 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
Blowing Up Trains
UK
{ Excerpts from Seven Pillars of Wisdom }   By November, 1917, Allenby was ready to open a general attack against the Turks along his whole front. The Arabs should have done the same in their...
Blowing Up Trains
D.H. Lawrence
15 min
The Curve
Argentina
She has long legs like a pair of rivers coming together at the source, a deep lagoon: dark, wet and mysterious. But she also has a pair of repeating words, a tattoo on her back and...
The Curve
Hernán Ronsino
2 min
The Queen of Spades
Russia
At the house of Naroumov, a cavalry officer, the long winter night had been passed in gambling. At five in the morning breakfast was served to the weary players. The winners ate with relish; the losers,...
The Queen of Spades
Alexander Sergeievitch Pushkin
14 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
The Diamond Necklace
France
The girl was one of those pretty and charming young creatures who sometimes are born, as if by a slip of fate, into a family of clerks. She had no dowry, no expectations, no way of...
The Diamond Necklace
Guy de Maupassant
11 min
Guadeloupe
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
The Picture Horse
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
Possible Paths
Germany
I write: Vera’s coat has a button missing – the dog got it. She looks over my shoulder. One day he’ll get me, too, says Vera, you’ll see. I say: Don’t be silly.   The dog...
Possible Paths
Margarita Iov
9 min
The Fat Girl
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
The Beautiful Thieves
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
Milkface
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
It’s Me
Germany
The Sankt Johannesweide Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic encompasses spacious grounds. Patients have access to this Lower Bavarian gem among mental institutions from seven in the morning until six in the evening, five days a week. For the...
It’s Me
Kristina Schilke
9 min
Gethsemane
Germany
…and found her sleeping with sadness. The first words in the morning, the underlined phrase in the book with a ribbon marker, a present from Marie, and the sun rises behind the chestnut trees of the...
Gethsemane
Ralf Rothmann
9 min
Sloth
Germany
Fritz had met ‘that Hilda woman’ in a bar called Paradise Now – sheer chance, really. He never usually went to places like that. For years he had been rotating among three or four pubs and...
Sloth
Eva Menasse
13 min
We Were Fishing For Rockets
Germany
You pressed your Nazi grandfather’s signet ring into my hand and asked me to throw it in the sea or some other body of water. Because you couldn’t. And I said: I’m not doing that; he...
We Were Fishing For Rockets
Karen Köhler
9 min
The Great Illusion at Klingenreiter Lumber Sawmill and Woodworking Import Export
Germany
When Ferdinand Klingenreiter asked the audience, dear friends and family, boys and girls, to be quiet for his great illusion, some laughed; most went on talking. The Stadelmann girls interrupted their squealing chase and turned towards...
The Great Illusion at Klingenreiter Lumber Sawmill and Woodworking Import Export
Saša Stanišić
16 min
Shades of Grey
Germany
What do you want here? say the eyes. Stern eyes. The mouth just says, ‘Room number twelve is upstairs.’ Then she has to go, the hotel’s stern receptionist. Only loneliness is sleeping here tonight. No other...
Shades of Grey
Anna Prizkau
8 min
Corporal Billygoat and I
Poland
“Squad, stand easy… and fall out!” crowed Corporal Billygoat, in a voice that betrayed it had only broken lately. And at once, off duty now, he slapped Dragon on the back and said: “Hey, brother, go...
Corporal Billygoat and I
Tadeusz Konwicki
19 min
I Pray For You
Bolivia
They were drunk when he proposed it. That they go to a church in some little town and ask a priest to marry them on the spot, then return to Guan Zhou and keep drinking like...
I Pray For You
Liliana Colanzi
4 min
The Architect
Germany
When they woke up in the morning the architect was already sitting at his computer. His office was in the right wing of the building; they lived in the left wing. The light was on all...
The Architect
Maxim Biller
10 min
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