Our Collection – Page 2 – The Short Story Project

Russia

Poverty Brothers, what is the most fashionable word these days, eh? These days the most fashionable word around is, of course, “electrification”. I don’t deny the vast importance of shining a light on Soviet Russia....

Poverty | The Galosh

Mikhail Zoshchenko

6 min

USA

I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron. “I wish you would manage the time to come in and talk with me about your daughter. I’m sure...

I Stand Here Ironing

Tillie Olsen

9 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

Night. Varka, the little nurse, a girl of thirteen, is rocking the cradle in which the baby is lying, and humming hardly audibly: “Hush-a-bye, my baby wee, While I sing a song for thee.” A little...

Sleepy

Anton Chekhov

9 min

Romania

For the first few hours they drove silently. His father simply sat there without saying a word, just sniffling from time to time. It seemed to him that he was doing it ostentatiously. He could see...

The Cold

Augustin Cupsa

8 min

USA

This morning our gun dropped about 270 pounds of ICM on a smuggler’s checkpoint ten kliks south of us. We took out a group of insurgents and then we went to the Fallujah chow hall for...

Ten Kliks South

Phil Klay

15 min

UK

Before she went to Nigeria Julie bought twelve pairs of sharp dressmaking scissors. Good equipment showed respect. And buying things made it easier not to panic. She was afraid the women would resent her swanning in,...

Red Enters the Eye

Jane Rogers

15 min

Israel

“Did he talk to you?” “Not a word till Bilu Junction.” “And then?” “And then he slowed down and showed me the ugly shopping center they’re building there.” “Well, it all came as a surprise to...

Thorns

Sharon Horodi

13 min

Greece

It was one of those nights when our Athens was stewing in its own juice, a mixture of exhaust fumes, burnt plastic, teargas, despair. We struggled to seal off all the cracks; the air slipped through...

Dead Dog at Midnight

Kostas Katsoularis

33 min

Argentina

This wasn’t a pair of women’s shoes with perfectly formed heels dug out from the back of a wardrobe. Or a box containing letters from the war written lovingly to an eleven-year-old boy. Discoveries like that...

Kasos

Nicolás Mavrakis

12 min

Israel

The stuff remakers of dreams are made of Joel would always cherish the day he met Morris Sadovski. Sitting in a living room whose walls were covered to the brim with colorful oil paintings, Morris looked...

Beit Hakerem. Jerusalem, 1985

Nir Baram

21 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

Hungary

We’re sat at a long table on a stage: a German actor, a middle-aged Bosnian writer, a Croatian author in her thirties, a Croatian interpreter, a Serbian historian, a young Serbian writer, me, and the German...

The Book Fair: The Assassin’s Grandson

György Spiró

7 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

UK

That year I spent the best two months of the dry season on one of the estates – in fact, on the principal cattle estate of a famous meat-extract manufacturing company. B.O.S bos. You have seen the three magic letters on...

An Anarchist

Joseph Conrad

24 min

The Drone Eats with Me – Diaries from a City Under Fire

Gaza

Thursday 17th July The First Truce I wake to the news that Israel has declared a five-hour truce, beginning at 10am. The Palestinian Monetary Authority has also announced that, during these hours, the banks will open...

The Drone Eats with Me – Diaries from a City Under Fire

Atef Abu Saif

17 min

Israel

Also, I’m crazy about him and I don’t care what the neighbors say. I’ll even wear a leather skirt slit up to here if he wants. And with no underwear either. Nu, I’m a crazy old...

Gabriella (from Liebchen)

Yossi Waxman

13 min

Iraq

Everyone staying in the refugee reception centre has two stories – the real one and the one for the record. The stories for the record are the ones the new refugees tell to obtain the right...

The Reality and the Record

Hassan Blasim

16 min

Israel

He placed his notepad on his knee and wrote: Cloudy. The smell of gasoline and garbage bins. Then he looked out the window again to verify that there was nothing he had failed to note. The bus...

To Jaffa

Ayman Sikseck

7 min

Mexico

After walking for so many hours without coming upon even the shadow of a tree, not even the seed of a tree, not even a root of anything, you can hear dogs barking. You might sometimes...

They Have Given Us The Land

Juan Rulfo

6 min

Mexico

Why do I want a life without honor if I already bet everything I had? A. Esparza Oteo A highway can be like the high seas. The sun burning on your face, the fresh cleansing...

Outrage

Álvaro Enrigue

16 min

Cuba|UK

The mouse and I lived on a houseboat anchored near Notre Dame where the Seine curved endlessly like veins around the island heart of Paris. The Mouse was a small woman with thin legs, big breasts,...

The Mouse

Anais Nin

10 min

UK

August 6th 1983 APRIL 25th 1982, DOWNING STREET: Announcement of the recapture of South Georgia, in the Falkland Islands. Mrs Thatcher: Ladies and gentlemen, the Secretary of State for Defence has just come over to give me...

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

Hilary Mantel

22 min

Italy

They called him Malpelo, which means ‘evil-haired,’ because he had red hair: and he had red hair because he was a bad, malicious boy, with every promise of growing up into a first-rate rascal. And so all...

Rosso Malpello

Giovanni Carmelo Verga

16 min

Russia

An Unexpected Bender One day Antonina Alekseevna struck her husband with a rubber stamp and smeared his forehead with ink. The deeply offended Pyotr Leonidovich, Antonina Alekseevna’s husband, locked himself in the bathroom and wouldn’t let...

An Unexpected Bender | The Cashier

Daniil Kharms

5 min

Israel

We arranged to meet at the Bagration Underground station and walk to Gorbushka to see a Siberian punk band. Gromov explained how I would recognize him: “I wear glasses, the bridge is held together by wire....

Dance of the Swans

Alice Bialsky

11 min

India

The old Cool Water Well is said never to dry up, but it is now sealed, and serves only as a traffic roundabout. The streets around the well house contain a number of middle-class housing colonies....

The Cool Water Well Junction

Aravind Adiga

14 min

Peru

Sr. F.R. Montes came home at nine o’clock every night. He lived in a building on Armendáriz Street, in a spacious apartment with large windows and an infinite view of the ocean. Usually, after passing through...

An Archangel Named Gabriel

Alonso Cueto

7 min

Russia

Trees cannot talk and they stand as if riveted to the spot, but they are alive nonetheless. They’re breathing. They keep growing for as long as they live. Even enormous old-man trees – they grow a...

Two Brothers

Evgeny Schwartz

23 min

Austria

When I was lobbing cobble stones at policemen on that September 11th, I would never have dreamed that someday I would become a policeman myself. It was September 11, 1973. I don’t know how I had...

Enlightenment Before a Fall

Robert Menasse

15 min

Gaza

He reaches behind him, over the seat, so the passengers next to me in the back of the car can put their fares into his outstretched hand. He carelessly chucks the money down beside him, with...

Red Lights

Talal Abu Shawish

3 min

Russia

Savitsky, the commander of the Sixth Division, rose when he saw me, and I was taken aback by the beauty of his gigantic body. He rose — his breeches purple, his crimson cap cocked to the...

My First Goose

Isaac Babel

5 min

Israel

I was riding through the lowlands, the horse’s hooves scattering dry dust into the air. An inflamed red sun hovered on the horizon like a damaged eye, leaking tears of yellow and blue and tendrils of...

The Last Osama

Lavie Tidhar

27 min

USA

I woke up shaking, alone in my room. I was clammy cold with sweat; under me the sheet and the mattress were soaked. The sheet was gray and twisted like a rope. I breathed like I...

Previous Condition

James Baldwin

23 min

Argentina

We liked the house because, apart from its being old and spacious (in a day when old houses go down for a profitable auction of their construction materials), it kept the memories of great grandparents, our...

House Taken Over

Julio Cortázar

8 min

Palestine

Kadhim Ali paid no attention to the difficulties he was exposed to on account of his enthusiasm for the Brazilian football player Ronaldo. Kadhim Ali loved football but the people of his neighbourhood did not; they...

Ronaldo’s Seat

Mahmoud Shukair

6 min

Yugoslavia

It happened in 1923 or 1924. In Hamburg, I think. During a time of stock-market disasters and giddy devaluation: the daily wages of a dock laborer came to seventeen billion marks, and decent prostitutes charged three...

Last Respects

Danilo Kiš

10 min