English
0 min 70 min
The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids
USA
  The Paradise of Bachelors It lies not far from Temple-Bar. Going to it, by the usual way, is like stealing from a heated plain into some cool, deep glen, shady among harboring hills. Sick with...
The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids
Herman Melville
32 min
I Stand Here Ironing
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
The Laughing Hippopotamus
USA
On one of the upper branches of the Congo river lived an ancient and aristocratic family of hippopotamuses, which boasted a pedigree dating back beyond the days of Noah—beyond the existence of mankind—far into the dim...
The Laughing Hippopotamus
L. Frank Baum
12 min
The Pit and the Pendulum
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
The Strength of God
USA
The Reverend Curtis Hartman was pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Winesburg, and had been in that position ten years. He was forty years old, and by his nature very silent and reticent. To preach, standing...
The Strength of God
Sherwood Anderson
12 min
Ten Kliks South
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
The Gift of the Magi
USA
One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until...
The Gift of the Magi
O. Henry
8 min
The Northeast Kingdom
USA
He had always believed that his immortality would take the form of the Aerojet. The two-stage, solid-fuel boost rocket had been, in its time, one of the crowning achievements of human technology — the first apparatus to...
The Northeast Kingdom
Nathaniel Rich
41 min
Emerald City
USA
Rory knew before he came to New York what sort of life he would have. He’d read about it in novels by hip young authors who lived there. He saw the apartment, small but high-ceilinged, a...
Emerald City
Jennifer Egan
14 min
Safe Passage
USA
THE GRANDMOTHERS — dozens of them — find themselves at sea. They do not know how they got there. It seems to be after­noon, the glare from the sun keeps them squinting. They wander carefully, canes...
Safe Passage
Ramona Ausubel
15 min
A Pair of Silk Stockings
USA
Little Mrs. Sommers one day found herself the unexpected possessor of fifteen dollars. It seemed to her a very large amount of money, and the way in which it stuffed and bulged her worn old porte-monnaie...
A Pair of Silk Stockings
Kate Chopin
5 min
The JPEG
USA
At the end of the third week of April, Anna looked to her calendar and felt nothing for the retriever who’d started off the month with such vivacity. It had excessive hair, as usual, billowing in...
The JPEG
Rachel B. Glaser
12 min
Biography of a Dress
USA
This dress I am wearing in this black-and-white photograph, taken when I was two years old, was a yellow dress made of cotton poplin (a fabric with a slightly unsmooth texture first manufactured in the French...
Biography of a Dress
Jamaica Kincaid
9 min
No News, or What Killed the Dog?
USA
It was a day of holocausts, cataclysms, tornadoes, earthquakes, blackouts, mass murders, eruptions, and miscellaneous dooms, at the peak of which the sun swallowed the earth and the stars vanished. But to put it simply, the...
No News, or What Killed the Dog?
Ray Bradbury
9 min
How to Talk to Your Mother (notes)
USA
1982. Without her, for years now, murmur at the defrosting refrigerator, “What?” “Huh?” “Shush now,” as it creaks, aches, groans until the final ice block drops from the ceiling of the freezer like something vanquished. Dream, and...
How to Talk to Your Mother (notes)
Lorrie Moore
11 min
Walking Out
USA
As the train rocked dead at Livingston he saw the man, in a worn khaki shirt with button flaps buttoned, arms crossed. The boy’s hand sprang up by reflex, and his face broke into a smile....
Walking Out
David Quammen
44 min
A Manual for Cleaning Women
USA
42–PIEDMONT. Slow bus to Jack London Square. Maids and old ladies. I sat next to an old blind woman who was reading Braille, her finger gliding across the page, slow and quiet, line after line. It...
A Manual for Cleaning Women
Lucia Berlin
14 min
Summer in Samarkand
USA
When I try to remember how I ended up spending an entire summer in Samarkand, I am reminded of an anecdote about the folk hero Nasreddin Hoca. Walking along a deserted road one night, the story...
Summer in Samarkand
Elif Batuman
25 min
At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom
USA
Ten candles in a fish stick tell you it’s Gully’s birthday. The birthday girl is the center of attention; she squints into the popping flash cubes. The black cat seems to know every smooth cat pose...
At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom
Amy Hempel
7 min
The Yellow Wallpaper
USA
It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer. A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic...
The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
24 min
1/3 1/3 1/3
USA
It was all to be done in thirds. I was to get 1/3 for doing the typing, and she was to get 1/3 for doing the editing, and he was to get 1/3 for writing the...
1/3 1/3 1/3
Richard Brautigan
6 min
The Parts Where Your Pee Comes From
USA
She sat on a chair her hair cut short revealing her narrow neck. I wanted to cry and I wasn’t quite sure why exactly, that’s not true, I knew why. She gave me that intrusive thought that...
The Parts Where Your Pee Comes From
Emily Brout
6 min
Roy Spivey
USA
Traveling with a movie star   Twice I have sat next to a famous man on an airplane. The first man was Jason Kidd, of the New Jersey Nets. I asked him why he didn’t fly...
Roy Spivey
Miranda July
11 min
Six Ways to Jump off a Bridge
USA
Understand Blue Falls, how it got its name, how in dry years, in autumn, water slips over a flat edge, sheer and perfect, a wide liquid sheet reflecting a clear day—blue as an unraveling bolt of...
Six Ways to Jump off a Bridge
Brian Leung
15 min
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