Our Collection – Page 2 – The Short Story Project

USA

Tommy’s cousin Gabe. Tommy’s distant cousin Gabe from Stillwater, Minnesota. Tommy’s cousin Gabe, related to my husband through divorce and remarriage, in lieu of actual blood, who arrives on my front porch at dinnertime with a...

Gabe

Holiday Reinhorn

7 min

Morocco

I held an unusually long reed in my hand and I dipped it as deep as I could into the river. It fell in and disappeared in front of me. I took my feet out of...

Ladybird

Latifa Labsir

7 min

Israel

I wash my hands, scrubbing them. They still smell of shit. 1. Sophie went joyfully down the slide, straight into Danny’s waiting arms. When he offered to help her climb back up, she said, “By myself.”...

Safe Zone

Deakla Keydar

9 min

USA

Waythorn, on the drawing-room hearth, waited for his wife to come down to dinner It was their first night under his own roof, and he was surprised at his thrill of boyish agitation. He was not...

The Other Two

Edith Wharton

29 min

Palestine

We didn’t stay long at the bar. After we got Melanie’s text, I had the feeling that each of us wanted the other to finish their drink so we could take off for one of our...

Scenario (A Chapter from a Novel)

Saleem Albeik

7 min

The Lover’s Tale as told to Kamila Shamsie

UK

John’s childhood ambition was to be a pilot. Let’s sit with that a while. A boy grew up, like so many other boys all over the world, watching the skies, imagining himself in the endless blue....

The Lover’s Tale as told to Kamila Shamsie

Kamila Shamsie

15 min

UK

It was one of the secret opinions, such as we all have, of Peter Brench that his main success in life would have consisted in his never having committed himself about the work, as it was...

The Tree of Knowledge

Henry James

23 min

Russia

I could think of nothing else all month: Would they let me go to the Christmas party, or not? I was cunning. I prepared the ground. I told my mother about the glorious achievements of Zhenya Ryazanova,...

The Green Devil

Teffi

6 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

Ireland

Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the...

The Dead

James Joyce

62 min

UK

CHAPTER I–THE PROMISE “An old-fashioned Christmas.–A lively family will accept a gentleman as paying guest to join them in spending an old-fashioned Christmas in the heart of the country.” That was the advertisement. It...

An Old-Fashioned Christmas

Richard Marsh

22 min

Iraq

Today’s Friday. I might be mistaken though, and it could be Saturday. How stupid! Why couldn’t it be Sunday or Monday? It’s not worth thinking about or even looking at the calendar. I can’t even...

He Saw Too

Irada Al-Jubori

5 min

USA

The first time Heloise saw Mitch, he was standing beside the vending machines in the hospital cafeteria, angular and fresh in his puckery clean white scrubs. She had come in for a Coke and chips, not...

Uno

Eileen Pollack

29 min

USA

My lover’s fingers are long. When he stretches them out, they bow in the middle. When they bend, he can span five frets. He sits on the wide window sill, the guitar resting on his bare...

Astronomical Objects

Liz Prato

5 min

USA

He’s confused. Too shy. His sister died of leukemia when he was thirteen. He’s not over his wife yet. He’s intimidated by your sarcastic sense of humor. You’re smarter than he is and he can’t handle...

Words to Live By

Aimee LaBrie

2 min

USA

Rita Loomis had fallen asleep at her own retirement party. Her colleague Amelia Monroe noticed this from the back of the room, embarrassed for Rita, and grateful for herself. Because until that moment, Amelia was sure...

When the Lights Go Down

Liam Callanan

12 min

USA

She wriggled, squirmed, just a little, but a little was too much. It started as a shimmy at her hips and twisted up through her shoulders, reminding her of the rippling way a wet dog shakes...

What Do You Remember?

Sally Shivnan

11 min

Germany

Lately, on the night before Whit Sunday, I dreamed that I was standing before a mirror, occupying myself with my new summer suit, which my parents had had made against the approaching festival. The dress consisted,...

The New Paris

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

21 min

UK

Margaret Mahuntleth, in the corner of the big settle, basked in the hearth-glow like one newly come to heaven. Warm light reddened her knitted shawl, her white apron, and her face, worn and frail. It was...

Over the Hills and Far Away

Mary Webb

5 min

USA

She didn’t look a thing like his girlfriend. This alone should have been a sign that she was just a fling, a diversion from what he had known for the past five years. She began to...

Guess Who Was at the Party?

Kate Hill Cantrill

7 min

USA

The restaurant is crazy busy and my entire head is engulfed in the heat and steam and smell of all the dishes being cooked and readied on the line. I am tired. I am always tired...

Abracadabra

Diane Goodman

14 min

USA

At the Great American Lunch Hour young George O’Kelly straightened his desk deliberately and with an assumed air of interest. No one in the office must know that he was in a hurry, for success is...

The Sensible Thing

F. Scott Fitzgerald

21 min

Canada

THIS story happened a long time ago in the country where anything may happen. The people who belong to that country stay there, and nothing can induce them to journey beyond its borders. Also, very few travelers...

The Golden Apple Tree

Virna Sheard

26 min

USA

This version of the story is in English. In Milan. Standing tiptoe on the edge of a king-sized bed. She is shutting a window cut into the slant of the ceiling. She is naked. It is...

Meaning of Ends

Martha Witt

0 min

USA

I met Adam at the bookstore. He was in the section marked Biography/History and he was looking, extensively, at a book about some historical event no one’s ever heard of. The only way I knew it...

Two Days

Aimee Bender

8 min

UK

This slender narrative has no pretensions to the regularity of a story, or the development of situations and feelings; it is but a slight sketch, delivered nearly as it was narrated to me by one of...

The Invisible Girl

Mary Shelley

22 min

China

What, is she actually going to buy the tickets herself? This puts me to shame. Isn’t this guy looking at me, this bald-headed Russian, I mean? And this woman has her eyes fixed squarely on my...

At the Paris Cinema

Shi Zhecun

15 min

USA

For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds...

The Fulness of Life

Edith Wharton

15 min

USA

They’re married, but not to each other. Nat unlocks the door and then steps back, to let Ella go in first. The hotel room is high-ceilinged and square, and a double bed takes up most of...

Embrace

Roxana Robinson

26 min

Iraq

When I pulled Teresa’s postcard from the mailbox it was three in the afternoon. I didn’t read it at first, just glanced at it quickly as I stepped into the house, the card still clutched in...

Wars in Distant Lands

Najem Wali

22 min

UK

Katherine Farquhar was a handsome woman of forty, no longer slim, but attractive in her soft, full, feminine way. The French porters ran round her, getting a voluptuous pleasure from merely carrying her bags. And she...

The Border-Line

D.H. Lawrence

36 min

Israel

“Sonya, how could you? How can you wear those short dresses covered with pea-green dots?” “Sonya, have you said your prayers?” “Sonya, how can you listen to those fascists?” “Sonya, have you read Sholem Aleichem?”...

Chicken Morning, Noon and Night

Tasha Karluka

8 min

Russia

He looks like me and is the same height, but he appears to be a half-head taller – the cad. —From an old comedy As it happened, Alexander Golts came out of the vaudeville show...

Incident on Cur Street

Alexander Grin

7 min

USA

That very singular man old Dr. Heidegger once invited four venerable friends to meet him in his study. There were three white-bearded gentlemen—Mr. Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew and Mr. Gascoigne—and a withered gentlewoman whose name was the...

Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment

Nathaniel Hawthorne

14 min

Mexico

Sunshine crept into the room, forming a white frame around the short dark curtain that barely covered the window. The glow around the darkened window reminded him of Malevich’s black square. He sighed. Vera would have...

The Square

Elisa R.V. García

1 min

USA

David stared at Mimi’s picture, taken at his bar mitzvah twenty-five years ago. She was his cousin, a second cousin, and she and her family had come out to Milwaukee from Brooklyn for the occasion. He...

Seeing Miles

Steven Schwartz

13 min

Russia

It was said that a new person had appeared on the sea-front: a lady with a little dog. Dmitri Dmitritch Gurov, who had by then been a fortnight at Yalta, and so was fairly at home...

The Lady with the Dog

Anton Chekhov

26 min

Colombia

Almost, almost there, but not quite. Something woke me up. A noise. I’m dripping wet, but I didn’t get there. I’m still half asleep. Nearly, but not quite. The wind is blowing through the coffee groves;...

Down the Path

Juan Cárdenas

9 min

Mexico

When I was a little girl my mother had a fungus on one of her toenails. On her left pinkie toe to be exact. From the moment she discovered it she tried everything to get rid...

Fungus

Guadalupe Nettel

16 min

It Would Be Better If Some Continents Had Never Been Discovered. Europe, For Instance, Has Never Been Anything But Trouble.

Germany

There often used to be two of us. Three of us. Four, five, or six. I had brothers, sisters, a tarantula. Parents, yes, them too. Plus there was my Uncle Nikolai and the guy from the...

It Would Be Better If Some Continents Had Never Been Discovered. Europe, For Instance, Has Never Been Anything But Trouble.

Michel Decar

8 min

USA

Elli wouldn’t let me stop until we’d crossed the line into Utah. She was a nail in the passenger seat—rigid, sharp, her blue eyes darting back and forth between the speedometer and the double yellow lines....

End Times

Maxim Loskutoff

12 min

Israel

In September everyone’s looking for an apartment. Especially in Jerusalem. Especially students. This is the busy season for Yochanan Dvir, apartment renovator and owner of a few of them himself. Two small apartments which he renovated...

Talitha Kumi

Yitzhak Auerbach-Orpaz

22 min

Israel

That summer, I’d go there sometimes, and this week, I went again. It was a hot day at the end of summer. A hot wind blew from time to time, stopped suddenly and returned suddenly, full...

Apples in Honey

Yehudit Hendel

11 min

Germany

What you might think just after you’ve said goodbye to him and just before you leave the house: 1. What’s that photo on the wall? 2. Is that her in the photo on the wall? 3....

In View of the Geese

Kenah Cusanit

5 min

Catalonia

How quickly that dark line gets longer, how quickly the snuffed-out candles proliferate. CAVAFY, “Candles” (Tr. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard) “It used to be that wars would thin the herd. Now that there’s peace,...

Engagement Ring

Jordi Nopca

11 min

Slovenia

Cracks Many stories have happened. This is one of them. You have a wife, you have kids, you have a job, you have a car, you have a house in the suburbs. It appears you’ll...

Cracks | Mainland

Andrej Blatnik

3 min

Israel

Mr. Harlamov was a big man. He was a fearless man too and when he sat himself down at the harmonium (which was a kind of piano played with a foot bellows, or a kind of...

Harlamov

S. Yizhar

9 min

Austria

It has to be done, that’s clear, and today’s the day. Anne has an appointment – today, not tomorrow – and she’ll go there, and they’ll suck the embryo out of her. She’s going on her...

If That’s How It Is

Dorian Steinhoff

14 min

Mexico

Someone, probably the ticket inspector, told him that his was the only suitcase. No one else was going to Alquila today. There’s no way it can get lost. But Hernández insisted on taking it with him....

One Too Many

Emiliano Monge

9 min

Japan

According to Ashin’s “Essentials of Salvation,” the Ten Pleasures are but a drop in the ocean when compared to the joys of the Pure Land. In that Land the earth is made of emerald and the...

The Priest of Shiga Temple and His Love

Yukio Mishima

24 min

Uruguay

It was the whole matter of the gifts that made her think back to that night. Whenever they fought and he threw her out of the house, he always made her return the gifts he’d given...

The Size of My Love

Fernanda Trías

16 min

Uruguay

It’s a rough summer morning in Misiones, with all the sun, heat and tranquility that the season can provide. Mother Nature, open to the skies, seems proud of herself. Like the sun, the heat, and the...

The Son

Horacio Quiroga

6 min

France

For half a century the housewives of Pont-l’Eveque had envied Madame Aubain her servant Felicite. For a hundred francs a year, she cooked and did the housework, washed, ironed, mended, harnessed the horse, fattened the poultry,...

A Simple Soul

Gustave Flaubert

48 min

Russia

“— And you say that a man cannot, of himself, understand what is good and evil; that it is all environment, that the environment swamps the man. But I believe it is all chance. Take my...

After the Dance

Leo Tolstoy

11 min