Our Collection | The Short Story Project

USA

His name is Charles Jenkins, but everyone calls him Zeke. No one in Little Bend, Zeke included, knows why. This is what people know about Zeke: when Zeke was fourteen, back when he was Charlie, he...

Weather

Elizabeth Gonzalez

16 min

Nigeria

As told to Inua Ellams Senebesh is holding Dani’s hand under the rusting jeep in a car park in Khartoum. She is trying to stifle the laughter which is as ripe as fruit in her...

The Unaccompanied Minor’s Tale

Inua Ellams

9 min

USA

Now that Caroline lived alone for the first time in her life, she began to be irritated by the cleanliness of her house. When she left something somewhere, it stayed there. If she didn’t enter a...

The River Warta

Amy Gustine

20 min

USA

My parents always had visitors. They would come in the evening and sit in folding chairs on the back porch of our small house in New Brunswick. They greeted me—an only child —with the warmth of...

The Last Communist

Steven Schwartz

32 min

Israel

Yuda is banging the wall with his pillow; Moishe is switching the lights off and on again. I lay silent, not involved in the nightly disturbance. “He’s coming!” calls Zvika, the sun-shield watcher. We get under...

Sun Shields

Yariv Sapir

2 min

USA

On the third day after they moved to the country he came walking back from the village carrying a basket of groceries and a twenty-four-yard coil of rope. She came out to meet him, wiping her...

Rope

Katherine Anne Porter

11 min

Israel

A poet leaves his house in haste, heading toward the harbor. In one hand, he carries a book of poems; in the other, his keys. The man then boards a British ship that takes him from...

Keys

Salman Natour

7 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

Australia

The Western train had just arrived at Redfern railway station with a lot of ordinary passengers and one swagman. He was short, and stout, and bow-legged, and freckled, and sandy. He had red hair and small,...

Enter Mitchell

Henry Lawson

2 min

New Zealand

And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled...

The Garden Party

Katherine Mansfield

21 min

Israel

On the night before her last spell in the hospital, Dawn was haunted again by that old dream about the stone men. As always, she woke the moment she couldn’t stand being terrorized any longer. She...

Heart of Stone

Nir Yehudai

26 min

Slovakia

My mother said to me: ‘You must go to school, or they will lock up your father.’ There were five of us children at home, four girls and one boy. The eldest was my sister, then...

How I Went to School

Tera Fabiánová

18 min

USA

Day had broken cold and grey, exceedingly cold and grey, when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail and climbed the high earth-bank, where a dim and little-travelled trail led eastward through the fat...

To Build a Fire

Jack London

28 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

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

Germany

Sergeant Guy Bohn was a lawyer in civilian life. In the winter of 1939 he had been transferred from active front line service as a soldier of France near the Luxembourg border because of a serious...

I Only Blast Under Written Orders

Alexander Kluge

5 min

Mexico

I met Olegario and his son William in the town cantina. I’d been on the run for weeks, travelling drunkenly from one place to another. I slept in the car and ate when I was hungry....

Sons

José Miguel Tomasena

9 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

Ireland

She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was tired. Few people passed. The...

Eveline

James Joyce

7 min

Russia

I When the waste and dreariness of her life become too much for Zivia, the younger and more embittered of the two unmarried Pozis sisters, she stops eating and washing. Wearing only her shift and...

Impoverished

David Bergelson

11 min

France

To Martinez de la Rosa. The clock of the little town of Menda had just struck midnight. At that moment a young French officer, leaning on the parapet of a long terrace which bordered the...

El Verdugo

Honoré de Balzac

11 min

Netherlands

The low sun, the brass bands, the President’s face blazing with self-confidence. Everyone over thirty can still bring the images to mind. The President, who was on an official visit to Afrasia, a turbulent and largely...

Interview With an Assassin

Daan Heerma van Voss

9 min

UK

“Halloa! Below there!” When he heard a voice thus calling to him, he was standing at the door of his box, with a flag in his hand, furled round its short pole. One would have...

The Signal-Man

Charles Dickens

20 min

Ireland

You never saw such surprise as that of the people of Ros Dha Loch when they heard that Nora, daughter of Marcus Beag, was to go to England. A sister of hers was already over there,...

Nora, daughter of Marcus Beag

Pádraic Ó Conaire

18 min