Our Collection | The Short Story Project

Israel

On dark, stormy nights they would run through the sleeping streets, burning torches in their hands, and no one saw their faces and no one knew their names. And the echoes of the steps of fourteen...

Autumn (A Fairy Tale)

Lea Goldberg

3 min

Ireland

Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the...

The Dead

James Joyce

62 min

UK

CHAPTER I–THE PROMISE “An old-fashioned Christmas.–A lively family will accept a gentleman as paying guest to join them in spending an old-fashioned Christmas in the heart of the country.” That was the advertisement. It...

An Old-Fashioned Christmas

Richard Marsh

22 min

Iraq

Today’s Friday. I might be mistaken though, and it could be Saturday. How stupid! Why couldn’t it be Sunday or Monday? It’s not worth thinking about or even looking at the calendar. I can’t even...

He Saw Too

Irada Al-Jubori

5 min

The Lover’s Tale as told to Kamila Shamsie

UK

John’s childhood ambition was to be a pilot. Let’s sit with that a while. A boy grew up, like so many other boys all over the world, watching the skies, imagining himself in the endless blue....

The Lover’s Tale as told to Kamila Shamsie

Kamila Shamsie

15 min

UK

It was one of the secret opinions, such as we all have, of Peter Brench that his main success in life would have consisted in his never having committed himself about the work, as it was...

The Tree of Knowledge

Henry James

23 min

USA

The first time Heloise saw Mitch, he was standing beside the vending machines in the hospital cafeteria, angular and fresh in his puckery clean white scrubs. She had come in for a Coke and chips, not...

Uno

Eileen Pollack

29 min

USA

My lover’s fingers are long. When he stretches them out, they bow in the middle. When they bend, he can span five frets. He sits on the wide window sill, the guitar resting on his bare...

Astronomical Objects

Liz Prato

5 min

USA

He’s confused. Too shy. His sister died of leukemia when he was thirteen. He’s not over his wife yet. He’s intimidated by your sarcastic sense of humor. You’re smarter than he is and he can’t handle...

Words to Live By

Aimee LaBrie

2 min

USA

She wriggled, squirmed, just a little, but a little was too much. It started as a shimmy at her hips and twisted up through her shoulders, reminding her of the rippling way a wet dog shakes...

What Do You Remember?

Sally Shivnan

11 min

USA

Rita Loomis had fallen asleep at her own retirement party. Her colleague Amelia Monroe noticed this from the back of the room, embarrassed for Rita, and grateful for herself. Because until that moment, Amelia was sure...

When the Lights Go Down

Liam Callanan

12 min

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

UK

Margaret Mahuntleth, in the corner of the big settle, basked in the hearth-glow like one newly come to heaven. Warm light reddened her knitted shawl, her white apron, and her face, worn and frail. It was...

Over the Hills and Far Away

Mary Webb

5 min

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

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

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

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

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

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

USA

They’re married, but not to each other. Nat unlocks the door and then steps back, to let Ella go in first. The hotel room is high-ceilinged and square, and a double bed takes up most of...

Embrace

Roxana Robinson

26 min

USA

At the Great American Lunch Hour young George O’Kelly straightened his desk deliberately and with an assumed air of interest. No one in the office must know that he was in a hurry, for success is...

The Sensible Thing

F. Scott Fitzgerald

21 min

Canada

THIS story happened a long time ago in the country where anything may happen. The people who belong to that country stay there, and nothing can induce them to journey beyond its borders. Also, very few travelers...

The Golden Apple Tree

Virna Sheard

26 min

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

Russia

He looks like me and is the same height, but he appears to be a half-head taller – the cad. —From an old comedy As it happened, Alexander Golts came out of the vaudeville show...

Incident on Cur Street

Alexander Grin

7 min