Our Collection | The Short Story Project

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