A lovely place to begin
The Gift of the Magi
“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…”
Settle in and read →A hidden nook. A world of stories.
Come in.
Get comfortable.
Stay for a story.
Classic short stories for a little time away. Find a familiar voice, or a new favorite.
Find your next storyFree to read.
946 stories to get lost in23 authors to keep you companyRead a little. Take something with you.
A little time, well spent.
Four very different worlds. Each less than fifteen minutes away.
A Little Journey
Ray BradburyAfter a Mars-based spiritual grifter strands a group of elderly women, their leader decides they will take the promised journey anyway.
11 min · Bittersweet
More details
- Themes
- Faith & doubt · Aging · Appearance vs reality
- Settings
- Other worlds · Space & spacecraft
- Tone
- Darkly comic
- Style
- Conversational
- Pace
- Brisk
- Written for
- For adults
- Motifs
- Journeys & quests
The Skylight Room
O. HenryA struggling typist finds a small, private universe in the star she watches through the skylight of her attic room.
10 min · Melancholy
More details
- Themes
- Class & poverty · Isolation · Survival
- Settings
- The city
- Tone
- Sentimental
- Style
- Ornate · Descriptive
- Pace
- Measured
- Written for
- For adults
The Lost Inheritance
H. G. WellsA shabby barroom storyteller explains how he was promised a fortune by an unread author—and why he never received it.
12 min · Humorous
More details
- Themes
- Greed · Wealth & money · Hypocrisy
- Tone
- Wry
- Style
- Conversational · Dialect-rich
- Pace
- Measured
- Written for
- For adults
- Craft
- Frame story
- Motifs
- Inheritance & wills
Araby
James JoyceA boy promises to bring a gift from a bazaar to the girl he adores, and waits for his chance to go.
11 min · Melancholy
More details
- Themes
- Coming of age · Self-deception · Unrequited love
- Settings
- The city
- Pace
- Measured
- Written for
- For adults
Meet your next favorite writer
Great voices. Good places to start.
A few hand-picked doors into each author’s work.
The Gift of the Magi
9 min · TenderDella has one dollar and eighty-seven cents, and one day left to buy her husband a Christmas present worth giving.
The Last Leaf
11 min · BittersweetIn a Greenwich Village artists' colony, a gravely ill young painter ties her fate to the last leaf on a neighboring vine.
Mammon and the Archer
11 min · RomanticA millionaire father bets that money can solve his son's romantic dilemma, while the young lover searches for one uninterrupted moment.
Ray Bradbury
Science fiction and fantasy about technology, war, childhood, and fear.
Explore 16 stories →Zero Hour
14 min · ForebodingAcross peaceful future suburbs, children take up a new game called Invasion—and their parents cannot decide whether to take it seriously.
The Creatures That Time Forgot
71 min · WondrousOn a world where people are born, grow old, and die within eight days, a boy races against his own lifetime to find a way beyond it.
Hills Like White Elephants
7 min · ClaustrophobicWhile waiting for a train through Spain, a couple circles the life-changing decision neither can name directly.
Indian Camp
7 min · UnsettlingA boy accompanies his doctor father across a dark lake to help a woman in labor, entering a night of pain, birth, and adult mystery.
The Three Day Blow
14 min · MelancholyAs an autumn storm lashes Michigan, Nick Adams and Bill drink by the fire and talk around the breakup Nick cannot quite explain.
The Telltale Heart
10 min · ChillingA murderer explains how he killed an old man, then hears a sound that destroys his confidence when police arrive.
The Cask of Amontillado
11 min · ForebodingA connoisseur leads his insulter down into the family catacombs to settle a score over a rare sherry.
The Fall of the House of Usher
33 min · ForebodingA man answers a childhood friend’s urgent summons and enters a decaying estate where the house and its last family seem bound together.
The Colour Out of Space
56 min · ForebodingAfter a meteor lands on a New England farm, the soil, animals, and family begin to change in ways that local science cannot explain.
The Call of Cthulhu
54 min · ForebodingA scholar links a dead professor's papers, a global cult, and a sailor's account to the same ancient being beneath the Pacific.
The Music of Erich Zann
16 min · EerieAn impoverished student becomes obsessed with the strange nightly music of a mute viol player on a street missing from every map.
Mary Shelley
Gothic stories about ambition, grief, supernatural bargains, and isolation.
Explore 18 stories →The Mortal Immortal
25 min · MelancholyAfter drinking an alchemist's unfinished elixir, a lovesick young man begins to outlive everyone he knows.
The Invisible Girl
26 min · EerieA grieving traveler follows an unexplained beacon to an abandoned Welsh tower.
Transformation
32 min · ChillingExiled by his own pride, a reckless nobleman accepts a stranger's miraculous bargain.
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
Pride, cruelty, self-interest, and conflicting accounts of events.
Explore 13 stories →Rashōmon
12 min · EerieIn a ruined Kyoto gate, a hungry servant encounters a stranger whose desperate act forces him to decide what survival permits.
The Badger
5 min · DreamlikeA moonlit song outside a village house becomes the first chapter in a legend about Japan’s shape-shifting badgers.
The Nose
13 min · HumorousA Buddhist priest’s determined campaign to shorten his extraordinary nose brings him the attention he thought he wanted, and also a new humiliation.
H. G. Wells
Scientific discoveries, strange encounters, and the consequences of power.
Explore 55 stories →The Magic Shop
18 min · WondrousA father follows his young son into a shop where stage tricks become genuine magic and every doorway leads deeper from ordinary London.
The New Accelerator
25 min · PlayfulA physiologist’s new stimulant speeds thought and movement so radically that the outside world seems frozen in time.
The Country of the Blind
44 min · ReflectiveA sighted mountaineer falls into an isolated valley where blindness is universal—and learns that his advantage has no accepted meaning.
Anton Chekhov
Ordinary lives, loneliness, social rank, and difficult relationships.
Explore 186 stories →The Bet
13 min · SuspensefulA banker’s reckless wager condemns a young lawyer to fifteen years of voluntary solitude for a fortune.
The Lady with the Dog
30 min · RomanticA practiced seducer meets a married woman at a seaside resort and discovers that their affair has become more serious than either expected.
Misery
10 min · MelancholyA grieving cabman carries strangers through the snowy city, searching among them for someone willing to hear about his son.
Guy de Maupassant
Class, money, desire, wartime cruelty, and fear of the unknown.
Explore 275 stories →The Necklace
13 min · TragicA clerk’s dissatisfied wife borrows a glittering necklace for one night among the wealthy, then pays dearly when it vanishes.
Two Friends
10 min · TragicDuring the siege of Paris, two old fishing companions cross the French lines for one peaceful morning beside the Seine.
The Horla
44 min · ChillingA country gentleman records the invisible presence that seems to drain his strength, command his will, and turn his home into a prison.