0 min 70 min
Heidi is Dead
USA
The car that ran over Heidi didn’t even put on its brakes, let alone pull to the curb. Instead it signaled right onto Lexington Street. Heidi was a puppy, and a worried bloody smear on the...
Heidi is Dead
Sherrie Flick
8 min
Pan and Pirates
USA
Hugh Furlong tells people that the single, snapshot moment that’s been burned into his brain to mark the end of his childhood was the moment he saw his brother Peter’s fist make contact with Albert Frank’s...
Pan and Pirates
Ashley Cowger
11 min
Produce
USA
I’ve started grocery shopping at one of the new, big places that takes up an entire city block, but claims to support the envi­ronment and our health and world peace and all of that. It’s one...
Produce
Sarah Gerkensmeyer
2 min
Guess Who Was at the Party?
USA
She didn’t look a thing like his girlfriend. This alone should have been a sign that she was just a fling, a diversion from what he had known for the past five years. She began to...
Guess Who Was at the Party?
Kate Hill Cantrill
7 min
Fifty Shekels
Palestine
The three men headed out to Tel Aviv on the rough road. Two Palestinians and a Jordanian—or rather a Palestinian with a Jordanian passport, to be precise. “50 shekels.” “At least.” “If one of them wants...
Fifty Shekels
Raji Bathish
6 min
The Last Communist
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
Rooms
Israel
His heart suddenly flipped over in his chest. “Just like a carp in the kitchen sink,” Grigory Katz thought. To calm himself down, he stuck his nose into his scarf and breathed in his own warm...
Rooms
Anna Likhtikman
8 min
Mr. Tallent’s Ghost
UK
The first time I ever met Mr. Tallent was in the late summer of 1906, in a small, lonely inn on the top of a mountain. For natives, rainy days in these places are not very...
Mr. Tallent’s Ghost
Mary Webb
17 min
The Cat
Sweden
A cat was lying in the ditch by the exit road to Skogså, one of those long, strange autumn days when I’d just entered seventh grade but mostly tried to learn about magic, if any occult...
The Cat
Andrea Lundgren
24 min
Abracadabra
USA
The restaurant is crazy busy and my entire head is engulfed in the heat and steam and smell of all the dishes being cooked and readied on the line. I am tired. I am always tired...
Abracadabra
Diane Goodman
14 min
The New Paris
Germany
Lately, on the night before Whit Sunday, I dreamed that I was standing before a mirror, occupying myself with my new summer suit, which my parents had had made against the approaching festival. The dress consisted,...
The New Paris
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
21 min
Napoleon and the Spectre
UK
Well, as I was saying, the Emperor got into bed. “Chevalier,” says he to his valet, “let down those window-curtains, and shut the casement before you leave the room.” Chevalier did as he was told, and...
Napoleon and the Spectre
Charlotte Brontë
4 min
The Unaccompanied Minor’s Tale
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
Coming of Age in Karhide
USA
SOV THADE TAGE EM EREB, OF RER IN KARHIDE, ON GETHEN I live in the oldest city in the world. Long before there were kings in Karhide, Rer was a city, the marketplace and meeting ground...
Coming of Age in Karhide
Ursula Le Guin
31 min
The Bowmen
UK
It was during the Retreat of the Eighty Thousand, and the authority of the Censorship is sufficient excuse for not being more explicit. But it was on the most awful day of that awful time, on...
The Bowmen
Arthur Machen
4 min
The Marble Child
UK
All over the pavement of the church spread the exaggerated cross-hatching of the old pews’ oak, a Smithfield market of intersecting lines such as children made with cards in the old days when kings and knaves...
The Marble Child
Edith Nesbit
14 min
Meaning of Ends
USA
This version of the story is in English. In Milan. Standing tiptoe on the edge of a king-sized bed. She is shutting a window cut into the slant of the ceiling. She is naked. It is...
Meaning of Ends
Martha Witt
0 min
Two Days
USA
I met Adam at the bookstore. He was in the section marked Biography/History and he was looking, extensively, at a book about some historical event no one’s ever heard of.  The only way I knew it...
Two Days
Aimee Bender
8 min
The Invisible Girl
UK
This slender narrative has no pretensions to the regularity of a story, or the development of situations and feelings; it is but a slight sketch, delivered nearly as it was narrated to me by one of...
The Invisible Girl
Mary Shelley
22 min
At the Paris Cinema
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
Enter Mitchell
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
The History of England
UK
BY A PARTIAL, PREJUDICED, AND IGNORANT HISTORIAN. To Miss Austen, eldest daughter of the Rev. George Austen, this work is inscribed with all due respect by THE AUTHOR. N.B. There will be very few Dates in...
The History of England
Jane Austen
14 min
Bull
USA
His father was now his mother but he was still an epic asshole. “He won’t even let me get a tattoo,” Josh said. “He gets his whole dick cut off and he won’t even let me...
Bull
Kathy Anderson
11 min
The Magic Shop
USA
I had seen the Magic Shop from afar several times; I had passed it once or twice, a shop window of alluring little objects, magic balls, magic hens, wonderful cones, ventriloquist dolls, the material of the...
The Magic Shop
H. G. Wells
15 min
1 12 13 14 15 16 32

Skip to content