THE RED ROOM by H. G. Wells “I can assure you,” said I, “that it will take a very tangible ghost to frighten me.” And I stood up before the fire with my glass in my hand. “It is your own choosing,” said the man with the withered arm, and glanced at me askance. “Eight-and-twenty…
Classic Authors
WITCHES’ LOAVES by O’Henry
WITCHES’ LOAVES by O’Henry Miss Martha Meacham kept the little bakery on the corner (the one where you go up three steps, and the bell tinkles when you open the door). Miss Martha was forty, her bank-book showed a credit of two thousand dollars, and she possessed two false teeth and a sympathetic heart. Many…
EVELINE by James Joyce
EVELINE by James Joyce 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 man out of the last house passed on his way home; she heard his footsteps…
REGINALD IN RUSSIA by Saki
REGINALD IN RUSSIA by Saki Reginald sat in a corner of the Princess’s salon and tried to forgive the furniture, which started out with an obvious intention of being Louis Quinze, but relapsed at frequent intervals into Wilhelm II. He classified the Princess with that distinct type of woman that looks as if it habitually…
THE SISTERS by James Joyce
THE SISTERS by James Joyce THERE was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he…
THE BET by Anton Chekhov
IT WAS a dark autumn night. The old banker was walking up and down his study and remembering how, fifteen years before, he had given a party one autumn evening
THE ADVENTURE OF THE SPECKLED BAND by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
THE ADVENTURE OF THE SPECKLED BAND On glancing over my notes of the seventy odd cases in which I have during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes, I find many tragic, some comic, a large number merely strange, but none commonplace; for, working as he did rather for…
THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM by Edgar Allen Poe
THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM
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.
The Black Veil by Charles Dickens
The Black Veil One winter’s evening, towards the close of the year 1800, or within a year or two of that time, a young medical practitioner, recently established in business, was seated by a cheerful fire in his little parlor, listening to the wind which was beating the rain in pattering drops against the window…
TOBERMORY by Saki
TOBERMORY by Saki It was a chill, rain-washed afternoon of a late August day, that indefinite season when partridges are still in security or cold storage, and there is nothing to hunt?unless one is bounded on the north by the Bristol Channel, in which case one may lawfully gallop after fat red stags. Lady Blemley’s…
THE Queens of Spades by Alexsandr S. Pushkin
Problems with formatting click here. The Queens of Spades by Alexsandr S. Pushkin I There was a card party at the rooms of Narumov of the Horse Guards. The long winter night passed away imperceptibly, and it was five o’clock in the morning before the company sat down to supper. Those who had won, ate…
TO BUILD A FIRE by Jack London
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…
The Lady With The Dog by Anton Chekhov
Intro to The Lady with the Dog by Anton Chekov by Richard Everywriter (Editors note, this story was first published 2/21/2010 and updated 4/12/2025) We first published “The Lady with the Dog” on our website about 15 years ago. It was one of the earliest digital versions of this classic that subsequently spread across the…
The Red-Headed League by Arthur Conan Doyle
I had called upon my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, one day in the autumn of last year and found him in deep conversation with a very stout, florid-faced, elderly gentleman with fiery red hair.