Our Collection | The Short Story Project

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

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

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

USA

For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds...

The Fulness of Life

Edith Wharton

15 min

UK

Katherine Farquhar was a handsome woman of forty, no longer slim, but attractive in her soft, full, feminine way. The French porters ran round her, getting a voluptuous pleasure from merely carrying her bags. And she...

The Border-Line

D.H. Lawrence

36 min

Ireland

Dracula’s Guest was excised from the original Dracula manuscript by its publisher because of the length of the original book. It was published as a short story in 1914, two years after Stoker’s death. ***...

Dracula’s Guest

Bram Stoker

13 min

USA

One confidential evening, not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me this story of the Door in the Wall. And at the time I thought that so far as he was concerned it was a true...

The Door in the Wall

H. G. Wells

27 min

UK

“My aunt will be down presently, Mr. Nuttel,” said a very self-possessed young lady of fifteen; “in the meantime you must try and put up with me.” Framton Nuttel endeavoured to say the correct something which...

The Open Window

Saki

4 min

USA

Mother says that when I start talking I never know when to stop. But I tell her the only time I get a chance is when she ain’t around, so I have to make the most...

The Golden Honeymoon

Ring Lardner

26 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

USA

That very singular man old Dr. Heidegger once invited four venerable friends to meet him in his study. There were three white-bearded gentlemen—Mr. Medbourne, Colonel Killigrew and Mr. Gascoigne—and a withered gentlewoman whose name was the...

Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment

Nathaniel Hawthorne

14 min

Germany

This story is from the collection called “The Sheik of Alexandria and his Slaves,” and is supposed to be told by a slave to the Sheik. Sir, those people are much mistaken who fancy that...

Nose Dwarf

Wilhelm Hauff

44 min

USA

The Palace Hotel at Fort Romper was painted a light blue, a shade that is on the legs of a kind of heron, causing the bird to declare its position against any background. The Palace Hotel,...

The Blue Hotel

Stephen Crane

42 min

USA

Lena was patient, gentle, sweet and german. She had been a servant for four years and had liked it very well. Lena had been brought from Germany to Bridgepoint by a cousin and had been in...

The Gentle Lena

Gertrude Stein

54 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

Upon the half decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little old man walked nervously up and down. Across a...

Hands

Sherwood Anderson

9 min

UK

The King’s son was going to be married, so there were general rejoicings. He had waited a whole year for his bride, and at last she had arrived. She was a Russian Princess, and had driven...

The Remarkable Rocket

Oscar Wilde

17 min

USA

Found among the Papers of the Late Diedrich Knickerbocker. A pleasing land of drowsy head it was, Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye; And of gay castles in the clouds that pass, Forever...

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Washington Irving

48 min

UK

Between the silver ribbon of morning and the green glittering ribbon of sea, the boat touched Harwich and let loose a swarm of folk like flies, among whom the man we must follow was by no...

The Blue Cross

G.K. Chesterton

29 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

USA

“What will we do now?” said the adjutant, troubled and excited. “Bury him,” said Timothy Lean. The two officers looked down close to their toes where lay the body of their comrade. The face was...

Upturned Face

Stephen Crane

5 min

New Zealand

The week after was one off the busiest weeks of their lives. Even when they went to bed it was only their bodies that lay down and rested; their minds went on, thinking things out, talking...

The Daughters of the Late Colonel

Katherine Mansfield

28 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