Our Collection – Page 2 – The Short Story Project

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

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

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

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