Description Details
Here is a collection of strikingly different pieces by Flaubert: a prose poem in the voices of Death, Satan and Nero; the trials and apotheosis of a medieval saint; and the life of a selfless maid in 19th century France. Each exhibits the vigorous exactness, and the mixture of realism and romanticism, for which Flaubert is renowned....

Excerpt Details
Short stories

Description Details
This is the first of thirteen volumes of Anton Chekhov's short stories, translated by Constance Garnett. Anton Chekhov was a Russian doctor who turned to fiction as a hobby, and quickly blossomed into one of the masters of the short story genre. Though he is arguably best known for his dramatic works, such as The Cherry Orchard , his stories are widely considered to be some of the most perfect examples of short fiction ever written. Constance Black Garnett was an English housewife who taught herself Russian as a hobby, and subsequently introduced the English-speaking world to some of the greatest Russian authors, including Chekhov and Dostoevsky. Though she was almost entirely self-taught in her knowledge of Russian, she was a prolific translator, and her works are still lauded today for their readability and accuracy. (Summary by Kirsten Ferreri)...

Excerpt Details
Short stories

Description Details
Published in 1919, and listed on the Modern Library roster of the 20th century's 100 greatest novels in English, Winesburg, Ohio presents a series of loosely related character studies of the inhabitants of a fictional Midwestern town that together form a novel of unusual unity and vision. The inarticulate and lonely citizens of Winesburg, each with his or her own secret tale to tell, frequently relate those tales to, or through their interactions with, the character of George Willard, a young Winesburg citizen on the cusp of manhood with dreams of becoming a writer. Thus Winesburg tells the story of the townspeople's loneliness and alienation in parallel with the tale of George's own coming of age. The citizens of Winesburg are described obliquely as grotesques, but as the introductory chapter makes clear, The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost beautiful . . . (Description by Stewart Wills)...

Excerpt Details
Short stories

Description Details
A collection of 48 wonderful English language stories from Sholem Alechem, I. L. Perez, Shalom Asch, and others. Tales of humour and drama, tragedy and pathos set mostly in the Jewish communities of 19th-century eastern Europe, Russia, and the Ukraine. Translated from Yiddish by Helena Frank. (Summary by Adrian Praetzellis)...

Excerpt Details
Short stories

Description Details
What do you do for a fifth anniversary? We decided to have a collection of short works with a difference. We challenged our readers to find any short works which had 'five' in the title - in any language. They have done us proud, and the collection extends to three volumes of short stories, poems, fairy tales, memoirs, non-fiction and bible readings, in six languages. This is the third volume. (Summary by Ruth Golding)...

Excerpt Details
Short stories

Description Details
Selma Lagerlöf was born in Vaermland, Sweden, in 1858 and enjoyed a long and very successful career as a writer, receiving the Nobel-Price in Literature in 1909. She died in Vaermland in 1940. Invisible Links (Osynliga länkar) is a collection of short stories with an underlying theme about the links that influence and guide people’s actions and lives. It was first published in 1894 and the English translation in 1895. The stories are often set in Lagerloef’s Vaermland, but they also depict legends and history of Sweden, and some have connections to other works by Lagerloef. Invisible Links is a good introduction to the writings of Selma Lagerloef. (Summary by Lars Rolander)...

Excerpt Details
Short stories

Description Details
A well-to-do French farm family is destroyed by a flood. The story, thrilling to the very end, is told from the point of view of the family's 70-year-old patriarch. The story speaks of the helplessness of mankind in the face of the forces of nature. (Summary by Karen Merline)...

Excerpt Details
Short stories

Description Details
Tales of Unrest (1898) is the first collection of short stories by Joseph Conrad published in his lifetime. Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), a Polish-born English novelist, was a master in the formats of long short story and novella, a form of story longer than conventional short story but shorter than a novel. Some of Conrad's most acclaimed works have been written in these formats, most notably Heart of Darkness (1899). Tales of Unrest contains five stories; Karain: A Memory (written 1897; read by Jhiu), The Idiots (1896; read by Ann Boulais), An Outpost of Progress (1896; read by Kristine Bekere), The Return (1897; read by Raerity) and The Lagoon (1896; read by David Lazarus). Author's note read by Sibella Denton. (Summary by Illiterati)...

Excerpt Details
Short stories, Fiction, Literature

Description Details
Ernest Bramah is mainly known for his 'Kai Lung' books - Dorothy L Sayers often used quotes from them for her chapter headings. In his lifetime however he was equally well known for his detective stories. Since Sherlock Holmes we have had French detectives, Belgian detectives, aristocratic detectives, royal detectives, ecclesiastical detectives, drunken detectives and even a (very) few quite normal happily married detectives. Max Carrados was however probably the first blind detective. (Summary by Andy Minter)...

Excerpt Details
Mystery, Short stories

Description Details
This is a collection of city stories, fiction or non-fiction, in English and published before 1923. Contributions have been chosen by the readers themselves. Summary by BellonaTimes....

Excerpt Details
Essay/Short nonfiction, Short stories, Travel

Description Details
This year is the 200th anniversary of Dickens' birth. This is the fifth volume; the first volume of short works - fiction, essays, poetry and speeches, previously unrecorded for , was catalogued by Dickens' birthday on February 7th 2012. Further volumes may follow during the anniversary year. (Summary by Ruth Golding)...

Excerpt Details
Essay/Short nonfiction, Short stories

Description Details
In the six volumes of the Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories, Julian Hawthorne presents us thrilling and mysterious short stories from all corners of the world. Some of the stories appeared in this collection for the first time translated into English, and many of them come from unexpected sources, such as the letters of Pliny the Younger, or a Tibetan manuscript. In the fifth volume, we find stories written by German, Russian and Scandinavian authors. (Summary by Leni)...

Excerpt Details
Spy stories, Short stories, Mystery, Horror/Ghost stories

Description Details
Brazilian Tales is a collection of six short stories selected by Isaac Goldberg as best representative of the Brazilian Literature of his period - the end of the 19th century. His comprehensive preface aims at familiarizing the reader with a literature that was - and still is - virtually unknown outside the boundaries of its own land, and the pieces chosen by Goldberg to be translated belong to writers that reached popularity and appreciation while still alive. This pioneer volume, as the translator himself puts it, still keeps its charm and interest as a way of offering to the English speaking public some sample cases of Brazilian Literature. (Summary by Leni)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction, Short stories, Humor, Literature

Description Details
The Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern , is a work of enormous proportions. Setting out with the simple goal of offering American households a mass of good reading, the editors drew from literature of all times and all kinds what they considered the best pieces of human writing, and compiled an ambitious collection of 45 volumes (with a 46th being an index-guide). Besides the selection and translation of a huge number of poems, letters, short stories and sections of books, the collection offers, before each chapter, a short essay about the author or subject in question. In many cases, chapters contemplate not one author, but certain groups of works, organized by nationality, subject or period; there is, thus, a chapter on Accadian-Babylonian literature, one on the Holy Grail, and one on Chansons, for example. The result is a collection that holds the interest, for the variety of subjects and forms, but also as a means of first contact with such famous and important authors that many people have heard of, but never read, such as Abelard, Dante or Lord Byron. According to the editor Charles Dudley Warner, this ...

Excerpt Details
Short stories, Poetry, Fiction

Description Details
The fable is a small narrative, in prose or verse, which has as its main characteristic the aim of conveying a moral lesson (the moral), implicitly or, more normally, explicitly expressed. Even though the modern concept of fable is that it should have animals or inanimated objects as characters - an idea supported by the works of famous fabulists such as Aesop and La Fontaine - Phaedrus, the most important Latin fabulist, is innovative in his writing. Although many of his fables do depict animals or objects assuming speech, he also has many short stories about men, writing narratives that seem to the modern eye more like short tales than fables. Despite many other fables being attributed to Phaedrus, only five books are considered by scholarship to have been written by him. Phaedrus' five books of fables are here presented in a translation to English prose by Henry Thomas Ridley. (Summary by Leni)...

Excerpt Details
Short stories, Fiction, Ancient Texts, Classics (antiquity)

Description Details
Set during the Napoleonic Wars, this story features two French Hussar officers, D'Hubert and Feraud. Their quarrel over an initially minor incident turns into a bitter, long-drawn out struggle over the following fifteen years, interwoven with the larger conflict that provides its backdrop. At the beginning, Feraud is the one who jealously guards his honor and repeatedly demands satisfaction anew when a duelling encounter ends inconclusively; he aggressively pursues every opportunity to locate and duel his foe. As the story progresses, D'Hubert also finds himself caught up in the contest, unable to back down or walk away. This Conrad short story evidently has its genesis in the real duels that two French Hussar officers fought in the Napoleonic era. Their names were Dupont and Fournier, which Conrad disguised slightly, changing Dupont into D'Hubert and Fournier into Feraud. In 1977, it was turned into a movie, The Duellists, starring Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel. (summary adapted from Wikipedia)...

Excerpt Details
Short stories, Historical Fiction

Description Details
This collection of 63 writings by Mark Twain was published in 1875. Among other sketches, it contains The Jumping Frog in the original English, followed by a French translation (read here by Caroline Mittler) which Twain re-translated into English, showing how the French translation of his work was badly flawed. In many of these sketches, Twain shows his talent for outrageous and hilarious inventiveness, often in reaction to current events. (Summary by John Greenman)...

Excerpt Details
Short stories, Humor

Description Details
Lord Dunsany (24 July 1878 – 25 October 1957) was a London-born Anglo-Irish writer and dramatist notable for his work in fantasy. He was influenced by Algernon Swinburne, who wrote the line Time and the Gods are at strife in his 1866 poem Hymn to Proserpine, as well as by the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. In turn, Dunsany's influence was felt by H. P. Lovecraft and Ursula K. Le Guin. Arthur C. Clarke corresponded with Dunsany between 1944 and 1956. Those letters are collected in the book Arthur C. Clarke & Lord Dunsany: A Correspondence. Time and the Gods, a series of short stories written in a myth-like style, was first published in 1906. (Summary from Wikipedia)...

Excerpt Details
Short stories, Fantasy

Description Details
What do you do for a fifth anniversary? We decided to have a collection of short works with a difference. We challenged our readers to find any short works which had 'five' in the title - in any language. They have done us proud, and the collection extends to three volumes of short stories, poems, fairy tales, memoirs, non-fiction and bible readings, in six languages. This is the first volume. (Summary by Ruth Golding)...

Excerpt Details
Short stories, Poetry

Description Details
What do you do for a fifth anniversary? We decided to have a collection of short works with a difference. We challenged our readers to find any short works which had 'five' in the title - in any language. They have done us proud, and the collection extends to three volumes of short stories, poems, fairy tales, memoirs, non-fiction and bible readings, in six languages. This is the second volume. (Summary by Ruth Golding)...

Excerpt Details
Short stories, Poetry

Description Details
Written by Baroness Orczy and first published in 1919, The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel is a sequel book to the classic adventure tale, The Scarlet Pimpernel. The book consists of eleven short stories about Sir Percy Blakeney's exploits in rescuing various aristos and French citizens from the clutches of the guillotine. The stories which are listed below, are set in 1793 but appear in no particular order. They occasionally refer to events in other books in the series....

Excerpt Details
Fiction, Short stories

Description Details
Lowell Massachusetts was founded in the 1820s as a planned manufacturing center for textiles and is located along the rapids of the Merrimack River, 25 miles northwest of Boston. By the 1850s Lowell had the largest industrial complex in the United States. The textile industry wove cotton produced in the South. In 1860, there were more cotton spindles in Lowell than in all eleven states combined that would form the Confederacy. Mind Amongst the Spindles is a selection of works from the Lowell Offering, a monthly periodical collecting contributed works of poetry and fiction by the female workers of the textile mills. The Lowell Mill Girls, as the workers were known, were young women aged 15-35. The Offering began in 1840 and lasted until 1845. As its popularity grew, workers contributed poems, ballads, essays and fiction. The authors often used their characters to report on conditions and situations in their lives and their works alternated between serious and farcical. (Introduction adapted from Wikipedia by MaryAnn)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction, Short stories, Poetry

Description Details
In this DIRECTORY you'll see just what you never ought to be; and so, it should direct your way to Good Behavior, every day. The children of whose faults I tell are known by other names, as well, so see that you aren't in this group of Naughty Ones. Don't be a Goop! (The author's introduction)...

Excerpt Details
Children, Short stories, Poetry

Description Details
These 14 short stories about animals are superb examples of Roberts smooth storytelling style. Knows as the Father of Canadian Poetry, he loved to also write in prose about the wilderness and the personalities of the animals to be found there as well as the exciting things they are capable of. Bears, White Wolves, Lynxs, hawks and yes, cattle are just a few of the animals written about. (Summary by philchenevert)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction, Short stories

Description Details
Voltairine de Cleyre (November 17, 1866 - June 20, 1912) was an American anarchist. She was skilled in many subjects and wrote essays, poems, letters, sketches, stories and speeches. These are her selected letters, sketches and stories. (Summary by enko)...

Excerpt Details
Short stories, Philosophy

Description Details
Baroness Emma Orczy (full name: Emma (Emmuska) Magdolna Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála Orczy de Orczi) (September 23, 1865 – November 12, 1947) was a British novelist, playwright and artist of Hungarian noble origin. She was most notable for her series of novels featuring the Scarlet Pimpernel. Castles in the Air, a short novel or perhaps more like a collection of short stories with memories of a French Rouge in the early 19th century Paris, was published in 1921 and about it I quote from the foreword: In very truth my good friend Ratichon is an unblushing liar, thief, a forger--anything you will; his vanity is past belief, his scruples are non-existent. How he escaped a convict settlement it is difficult to imagine, and hard to realize that he died--presumably some years after the event recorded in the last chapter of his autobiography--a respected member of the community, honoured by that same society which should have raised a punitive hand against him. (Summary by Wikipedia, Lars Rolander and Emma Orczy)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction, Short stories

Description Details
This was the last story published by Twain, a few months before he died. The story follows Captain Elias Stormfield on his extremely long cosmic journey to heaven. It deals with the obsession of souls with the celebrities of heaven, like Adam and Moses, who according to Twain become as distant to most people in heaven as living celebrities are on Earth. Twain uses this story to show his view that the common conception of heaven is ludicrous and points out the incongruities of such beliefs. A lot of the description of Heaven is given by the character Sandy McWilliams, a cranberry farmer who is very experienced in the ways of heaven. The heaven described by him is similar to the conventional Christian heaven, but includes a larger version of all the locations on Earth, as well as of everywhere in the universe. Once in heaven, the person spends eternity living as he thinks best, usually according to his true (sometimes undiscovered) talent. According to one of the characters, a cobbler who has the soul of a poet in him won't have to make shoes here, implying that he would instead turn to poetry and achieve perfection in it. As Stormfie...

Excerpt Details
Short stories, Fantasy, Humor

Description Details
Five short delightful stories for children, told in the voice of the papa to the girl and the boy William Dean Howells (March 1, 1837 – May 11, 1920) was an American realist author and literary critic. Nicknamed The Dean of American Letters, he was particularly known for his tenure as editor of the Atlantic Monthly as well as his own prolific writings, including the Christmas story Christmas Every Day and the novel The Rise of Silas Lapham. (Reader’s Note for story 3: A pony engine is a small locomotive for switching cars from one track to another.) (Summary by Wikipedia and David Wales)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction, Short stories, Children, Holiday

Description Details
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. The slim book Monday or Tuesday offers an excursion into Virginia Woolf's early excursions in stream of consciousness writing she was to become famous for; including her so-termed Moments of being, in a format of a collection of short stories mainly concerned with people's thoughts as well as psychology in general, the human and particularly female condition, and aesthetics which inspired and engaged her much of the time helping other writers to find publication through her and her husband Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press. (Summary from Wikipedia and LizMourant)...

Excerpt Details
Short stories

Description Details
A collection of Twain short stories including: The Loves Of Alonzo Fitz Clarence And Rosannah Ethelton On The Decay Of The Art Of Lying About Magnanimous-Incident Literature The Grateful Poodle The Benevolent Author The Grateful Husband Punch, Brothers, Punch The Great Revolution In Pitcairn The Canvasser's Tale An Encounter With An Interviewer Paris Notes Legend Of Sagenfeld, In Germany Speech On The Babies Speech On The Weather Concerning The American Language Rogers (Summary from Project Gutenberg)...

Excerpt Details
Fiction, Short stories

Description Details
Apart from Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow - the pieces which made both Irving and The Sketch Book famous - other tales include Roscoe, The Broken Heart, The Art of Book-making, A Royal Poet, The Spectre Bridegroom, Westminster Abbey, Little Britain, and John Bull. His stories were highly influenced by German folktales, with The Legend of Sleepy Hollow being inspired by a folktale recorded by Karl Musäus. Stories range from the maudlin (such as The Wife and The Widow and Her Son) to the picaresque (Little Britain) and the comical (The Mutability of Literature), but the common thread running through The Sketch Book — and a key part of its attraction to readers — is the personality of Irving's pseudonymous narrator, Geoffrey Crayon. Erudite, charming, and never one to make himself more interesting than his tales, Crayon holds The Sketch Book together through the sheer power of his personality - and Irving would, for the rest of his life, seamlessly enmesh Crayon's persona with his own public reputation....

Excerpt Details
Short stories, Fiction

Description Details
A classic collection of oral German folklore, brought together for posterity by the scholarly brothers Grimm in the 1800s, this epitome of fairy tales includes many of the world’s best known stories. In these dark foreboding woods, you will find: Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, Lily and the Lion (better known as Beauty and the Beast), and Snow White and Rose Red, among other timeless works. These tales were later heavily revised and sanitised, but here are presented closer to their grim and beloved originals. (Summary by Marlo Dianne)...

Excerpt Details
Short stories, Fairy tales, Children, Animals, Fantasy

Description Details
Boule de Suif (1880) is a short story by the late-19th century French writer Guy de Maupassant. It is arguably his most famous short story, and is the title story for his collection on the Franco-Prussian War, entitled Boule de Suif et Autres Contes de la Guerre (Boule de Suif and Other Stories of the War). John Ford said that his film Stagecoach was in many ways a western rewrite of Boule de Suif....

Excerpt Details
Short stories, Fiction, Literature

Description Details
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a short story by Washington Irving contained in his collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., written while he was living in Birmingham, England, and first published in 1820. It was based on a German folktale set in the Dutch culture of Post-Revolutionary War in New York State. With Irving's companion piece Rip Van Winkle, it is among the earliest examples of American fiction still read today....

Excerpt Details
Mystery, Short stories, Horror/Ghost stories