Short Stories
The Sea Raiders by H. G. Wells — Until the extraordinary affair at Sidmouth, the peculiar species Haploteuthis ferox was known to science only generically, on the strength of a half-digested tentacle obtained near the Azores, and a decaying body pecked by birds and nibbled by fish, found early in 1896 by Mr. Jennings, near…
Encounter With a Talking Head by VM Landi Every year during the summer my son and his wife, their two kids, and I would make the trip to the Jersey shore for a week. The oldest girl, Barbara, was around 3 the first year we took them, and her sister, Lena, was close to 2….
The sun sizzled the soft tanned skin of Alison Bailey, as she lay comfortably on her favorite azure beach towel; the soft gurgle of the ocean tide lulling her into a peaceful slumber. The beach was a place that Alison visited when felt the world shatter around her, when the gratifying constants of her
It’s bloody freezing. Margaret reached out a thin, leather-gloved finger to activate the handicapped access. She pressed hard before replacing her hand underneath the blanket draped across her lap.
A Tale of Hope by Veleka Georgieva a short story that begins: Some years ago a baby was born. It was a girl and they named it Hope. Hope had two parents…
An Encounter by James Joyce It was Joe Dillon who introduced the Wild West to us. He had a little library made up of old numbers of The Union Jack, Pluck and The Halfpenny Marvel. Every evening after school we met in his back garden and arranged Indian battles. He and his fat young brother…
Thrawn Janet by Robert Louis Stevenson The Reverend Murdoch Soulis was long minister of the moorland parish of Balweary, in the vale of Dule. A severe, bleak-faced old man, dreadful to his hearers, he dwelt in the last years of his life, without relative or servant or any human company, in the small and lonely…
Once upon a time, a certain ronin, Tajima Shume by name, an able and well-read man, being on his travels to see the world, went up to Kiyoto by the Tokaido
The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Of all the problems which have been submitted to my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, for solution during the years of our intimacy, there were only two which I was the means of introducing to his notice—that of Mr. Hatherley’s thumb, and that of Colonel…
MONTEZUMA’S CASTLE By C. B. CORY “No,” said the curiosity dealer, “that mummy is not for sale. I had too big a job to get it.” “Tell me about it,” I asked. The curiosity dealer carefully closed and locked the case, and then meditatively rolled a cigarette. “Well, it was this way: you see I…
THE POET AND THE PEASANT by O.Henry The other day a poet friend of mine, who has lived in close communion with nature all his life, wrote a poem and took it to an editor. It was a living pastoral, full of the genuine breath of the fields, the song of birds, and the pleasant…
A DRAMA IN THE AIR by Jules Verne In the month of September, 185–, I arrived at Frankfort-on-the-Maine. My passage through the principal German cities had been brilliantly marked by balloon ascents; but as yet no German had accompanied me in my car, and the fine experiments made at Paris by MM. Green, Eugene Godard,…
To Build a Fire by Jack London 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 spruce timberland. It was a steep bank, and he paused for…
French frigate La Boudeuse I On my right hand there were lines of fishing stakes resembling a mysterious system of half-submerged bamboo fences, incomprehensible in its division of the domain of tropical fishes, and crazy of aspect as if abandoned forever by some nomad tribe of fishermen now gone to the other end of the…