Our Collection | The Short Story Project

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

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

Ireland

For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick. It is a melancholy object to those, who walk...

A Modest Proposal

Jonathan Swift

10 min

Argentina

The moment he heard the scream – he hadn’t heard the gunshot, or hadn’t interpreted it as such, because once you’ve got used to the endless cascade of noise from an internal patio you stop trying...

Doing Your Duty

Ariel Magnus

11 min

UK

Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one...

The Mark on the Wall

Virginia Woolf

12 min

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

Russia

Night. Varka, the little nurse, a girl of thirteen, is rocking the cradle in which the baby is lying, and humming hardly audibly: “Hush-a-bye, my baby wee, While I sing a song for thee.” A little...

Sleepy

Anton Chekhov

9 min

Mexico

Tusnesdor arrives at the hotel at night after a ten-hour transatlantic flight. It’s hot in his room, even though the air conditioner is turned up as high as it will go, and Tusnesdor regrets not having...

The Forbidden Doors

Fabio Morábito

13 min

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

India

The postmaster first took up his duties in the village of Ulapur. Though the village was a small one, there was an indigo factory near by, and the proprietor, an Englishman, had managed to get a post office...

The Postmaster

Rabindranath Tagore

8 min

Czech Republic

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might...

On the Tram

Franz Kafka

1 min

Italy

Shaken by his wife with an angry tug on the arm, jolted out of his sleep again that night, was poor Mister Anselmo. “You’re laughing!” Dazed, and with his nose still stuffy from sleep, and wheezing...

You’re Laughing

Luigi Pirandello

9 min

Bolivia

Natalia was late arriving at the bar, but she brought us a story, which we all accepted as a kind of safe conduct. This time my sister didn’t apologize for the hour; she knew she’d been...

The Red Ribbon

Magela Baudoin

12 min

USA

‘Let–go–that–Oh-h-h! Please, now, will you? Don’t start drinking again! Come on–give me the bottle. I told you I’d stay awake givin’ it to you. Come on. If you do like that a-way–then what are you going to be...

An Alcoholic Case

F. Scott Fitzgerald

9 min

Romania

I’ve found so many things in my hat by now, I couldn’t even list them all. Sandwiches, rotten food, rocks, trash, dog shit more than once. I end up with more junk than bills. But of...

Caviar

Ilka Papp Zakor

6 min

Spain

When I was nine years old, my father hired me a whore. A whore, logically, who was nine years old. I have forgotten the clothes, the toys, the food, everything that was my life at nine...

The Japanese Garden

Antonio Ortuño

6 min

Lebanon|USA

Part One Miserable is the man who loves a woman and takes her for a wife, pouring at her feet the sweat of his skin and the blood of his body and the life of...

Madame Rose Hanie

Gibran Khalil Gibran

13 min

Spain

And you treated my woman to a flake of your life, And when she came back she was nobody’s wife. (Leonard Cohen, «Famous Blue Raincoat») Inside a lost trailer in the desert, a man holds...

Famous Blue Raincoat

Aixa de la Cruz

9 min

Puerto Rico

Sharon took advantage of the fact that we were washing the dishes to tell me she had been thinking about the day when Willie, my lover, would no longer be with us. “I can’t stop thinking...

The Garden

Luis Negrón

11 min

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

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

France

In Rue Las Cases it was as quiet as during the height of summer, and every open window was screened by a yellow blind. The fine weather had returned: it was the first Sunday of spring,...

Sunday

Irène Némirovsky

24 min

Argentina

A court in Edmonton, in the Province of Alberta, Canada, has found the Southern Tobacco Company guilty of the charges presented against it by Joshua Lynn and has ordered the company to pay compensation of two...

The Tobacco Man

Diego Vecchio

9 min

Israel|USA

Earlier, the pipe from the water tower on the roof burst and water began to fall. Now we’re sitting around my dining table in the living room, drinking Champale and eating humus on melba toast. Two...

The A Line

Miryam Sivan

17 min