Our Collection - The Short Story Project

USA

Passing Robitussin, my girlfriend guides the Bronco across the beach with her knee driving the wheel. Driving through night. Through black. She passes it to me. I take it, take some, pass it back. She takes...

NIGHTDRIVING

Robert Warf

9 min

Those Who Are Dead Are Only Now Forgiven

USA

The Shackleford house was haunted. In the skittering of leaves across its rotting porch, locals heard the whispered misery of ghosts. Footsteps creaked on stair boards and sobs filtered through walls. An Atlanta developer had planned...

Those Who Are Dead Are Only Now Forgiven

Ron Rash

13 min

USA

It’s late, and I can’t sleep. I raise a window for some spring Palo Alto air, but it doesn’t help. In bed, eyes open, I hear whispers, which makes me think of the president, because we...

NIRVANA

Adam Johnson

30 min

USA

Suppose you should be walking down Broadway after dinner, with ten minutes allotted to the consummation of your cigar while you are choosing between a diverting tragedy and something serious in the way of vaudeville. Suddenly...

The Green Door

O. Henry

10 min

USA

September 12, 1950. The survivors limp down the mountain to a 6×6 that drops them at the field service platoon behind the hills. Seven men remaining from forty, stunned and filthy as they line up for...

Services

Gordon Haber

8 min

UK

“My aunt will be down presently, Mr. Nuttel,” said a very self-possessed young lady of fifteen; “in the meantime you must try and put up with me.” Framton Nuttel endeavored to say the correct something which...

The Open Window

Saki

4 min

Germany

The infant prodigy entered. The hall became quiet. It became quiet and then the audience began to clap, because somewhere at the side a leader of mobs, a born organizer, clapped first. The audience had heard...

The Infant Prodigy

Thomas Mann

12 min

USA

It was the 15th of the August of 1999, the morning before the wedding of Benjamin Kern and Maitreya Scheffer, ceremony and celebration to be hosted by the bride’s parents at their home in Bethel, Vermont,...

Are You Enjoying Your Forgiveness?

Julia May Jonas

31 min

Israel

My father believed in Marxist karma as a thrilling destiny that was tailored to the measurements of his short, solid body. He viewed the world through defiant, eroding eyes, as if endowed with the ability to...

The First Of May

Iftach Alony

3 min

Spain

That’s the way life is: you push a button, and life turns on. —Clarice Lispector Leonora and Adelino were an old-fashioned couple. They had just turned eighty, and they shook with fear when they blew...

Eclipse

Almudena Sánchez

14 min

Israel

I knew that Hertz and his wife could not possibly be home at this hour. I even had a note ready in my purse: “Came by but found you were out. So sorry. Shoshana”. It was...

A Duty Call

Lea Goldberg

4 min

Scotland

The sun rises up the moss-covered walls to slip between the open concrete slabs and across the white tiled floor of the hawker centre, where June is wiping tables with a cloth that has become part...

Mee Goreng

CG Casci

16 min

USA

My Dearest Pearl, Your letter arrived last week, and of course, I read it many times like I do, then put it in the box with all your others, which you know I cherish. I will...

Crazy Over William

Rich Elliott

19 min

Spain

There’s a theory, quite well-known but difficult to prove, about the psychic powers of animals. Of most animals. How they can sense magnetic fields, electrical fluctuations, pregnancies, divorces, how they predict full moons. How, breathless, transfixed,...

Señora Smaig

Almudena Sánchez

14 min

USA

At noon, the aftermath of lovemaking, I was still wandering around the apartment naked, makeup smeared beneath my eyes. I messaged Sarah: Come to meeting with me. Her reply: I don’t need that stupid shit. I’d...

Summer of Fun

Kirie Pedersen

18 min

Russia

“Quite impossible, as you see, to start without an introduction,” laughed Ivan. “Well, then, I mean to place the event described in the poem in the sixteenth century, an age—as you must have been told at...

The Grand Inquisitor

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

25 min

Spain

I DO not know whether this is history which seems like a tale, or a tale which seems like history; what I can affirm is that in its core it contains a truth, a truth supremely...

THE RAY OF MOONSHINE

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

10 min

UK

One afternoon I was sitting outside the Cafe de la Paix, watching the splendour and shabbiness of Parisian life, and wondering over my vermouth at the strange panorama of pride and poverty that was passing before...

The Sphinx Without a Secret

Oscar Wilde

5 min

UK

Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure—a ghostly couple. “Here we left it,” she said. And he added, “Oh,...

A Haunted House

Virginia Woolf

2 min

UK

If we all knew our own minds (in a more enlarged sense than the popular acceptation of that phrase), I suspect we should find our nurses responsible for most of the dark corners we are forced...

Captain Murderer

Charles Dickens

4 min

Russia

So I was alone, surrounded by November gloom and whirling snow; the house was smothered in it and there was a moaning in the chimneys. I had spent all twenty-four years of my life in a...

The Steel Windpipe

Mikhail Bulgakov

8 min

Russia

IT was noon of a bright winter’s day. The air was crisp with frost, and Nadia, who was walking beside me, found her curls and the delicate down on her upper lip silvered with her own...

A Joke

Anton Chekhov

4 min

Israel

The summer I fell in love with AI was also the summer I fell in love with N, and the two weren’t unrelated. Early that summer, a machine N had built kept popping up in my...

Perpetuum Mobile

Zohar Elmakias

4 min

USA

Eight or nine years ago – I think it was summer 2012 – I found myself browsing the shelves at a bookstore in Tehran. Outposts of the local bookstore chain Shahr-e Ketab glitter like branches of...

The Translator I Never Wanted to Be

Mariam Rahmani

13 min