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Approximate Reading Times

Quick Read: under 5 minutes
Short Story: 5 to 30 minutes
Novelette: 30 to 90 minutes
Novella: 1.5 to 2.5 hours

Some Other Stories You May Like

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  • Kusum

    Quick Read by Khushwant Singh. An overweight, physically unattractive young woman compensates by being a model student and good girl with a capital G. That is until her passions are stirred by an accidental encounter with a cheeky young street hawker who makes an obscene, possibly flirtatious gesture at her.

  • The Easthound

    Short Story by Nalo Hopkinson. A virus has swept the world, causing all who achieve adulthood to “sprout” into ravenous, werewolf-like beasts. A group of children are closely monitoring an older boy who is about to undergo the change and will soon have to leave them, when the unexpected occurs.

  • Bartleby the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street

    Novelette by Herman Melville. A lawyer shows remarkable tolerance and compassion towards a disturbed scrivener (scribe). The man suffers from depression. Feeling alone in the world and lacking a meaning or purpose in life, his coping mechanisms are self-isolation, lack of communication and passive resistance to his duties at work.

  • Looking for Mr. Green

    Novelette by Saul Bellow. Set in the Great Depression, an intellectual white man gets a much-needed job delivering unclaimed welfare checks to people in a depressed black neighborhood. He wants to do well, and goes above and beyond in a quest to find the elusive Mr. Green.

  • Soldier’s Home

    Short Story by Ernest Hemingway. An American soldier has difficulty “fitting in” after returning from World War 1, finding himself alienated from his culture, community, friends, and family. He falls into depression and lethargy, obsessed with watching local girls go by, but avoiding contact with them.

  • The First Year of My Life

    Short Story by Muriel Spark. An omniscient baby “tunes in” to world events and the thoughts of famous people from her crib. Born in the final year of World War I, she contrasts the bloody battlefields of Europe with the almost business as usual atmosphere in London.

  • A Simple Heart / Soul

    Novelette by Gustav Flaubert. Set in nineteenth century France an uneducated, simple-minded girl lives through fifty years of drudgery as house servant to a “disagreeable” woman. Although she is shamelessly exploited, endures years of disappointment and loss, and suffers a painful, lonely death, she never gives in to despair.

  • Mrs. Frola and Mr. Ponza, Her Son-in-Law

    Short Story by Luigi Pirandello. Gossip rages when a respected civil servant doesn’t allow his wife to leave their apartment, or her mother to visit. He claims his “mother-in-law” is crazy; she says the same about him. Readers are left to decide which of the equally plausible stories is true.

  • The Moonlit Road

    Short Story by Ambrose Bierce. A rich man who doesn’t trust his loving wife sets a trap that doesn’t go as planned. He accidentally kills her, and the unfortunate woman’s ghost sets off a chain of events that ruins the lives of her husband and their only son.

  • Jacklighting

    Short Story by Ann Beattie. A troubled couple who, having travelled each year to visit a friend and his brother on his birthday, make the trip once more on the birthday following his death. Although each needs closure, they suppress their feelings and do not even discuss the dead man.

  • One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts

    Short Story by Shirley Jackson. A seemingly ordinary man fills his pockets with candy and peanuts and walks the streets of New York, helping strangers and acting “Mr. Nice Guy”. The next day, he walks the streets causing trouble for people and filing complaints about their rudeness and poor service.

  • The Murders in the Rue Morgue

    Novelette by Edgar Allan Poe. A seemingly insoluble locked-room mystery in which: the wrong man is arrested for the violent murder of two women; Poe’s amateur detective Dupin demonstrates the importance of critical thinking in problem solving; and an “Ourang-Outang” makes a monkey out of the police.

  • The Storyteller

    Short Story by Saki. When a woman traveling on a train fails to quieten three unruly children with a story about a good girl who is saved from a mad bull, a male passenger counters with a story about an extra-ordinarily good girl that does end so well.

  • Brownies

    Novelette by ZZ Packer. At a summer camp, a Brownie troop from a black neighborhood decide to “kick the asses” of an all-white troop. A misunderstanding leads to a confrontation. This doesn’t go as planned, causing the narrator to later conclude that racism is “something mean” she cannot stop.

  • Blues Ain’t No Mockin Bird

    Grade 7-8 Story by Toni Cade Bambara. The matriarch of a poor African-American family is angered by two white men making a government film. They invade her family’s privacy, speak down to her in a condescending way, and ignore her demand to stop filming. Fortunately, her husband sends them packing.

  • The Ingredients

    Short Story by Jason Reynolds. Four boys on the way to hang out at one of their homes try to outdo one another with descriptions of the exotic sandwiches they would like to eat when they get there. What they are served is very different to what they imagined.

  • Proper Library

    Short Story by Carolyn Ferrell. A gay, academically challenged African-American boy faces a conflict between doing well at school and his feelings for a former lover. The highlights of his day include learning words with his mother and acting as surrogate “big sister” to the younger children in his house.

  • The Tiger

    Short Story by S. Rajaratnam. A pregnant Malay woman tells fellow villagers about her encounter with a tiger as she bathed in a river. She feels uneasy when a party of men set out to shoot the apparently harmless animal, and is horrified by what they find after killing it.

  • Suzy and Leah

    Grade 7-8 Story by Jane Yolen. A girl's insensitive attempts at kindness by passing gratuitous handouts through a camp fence cause friction between herself and an orphaned holocaust survivor she is assigned to help at school. Understanding comes when one is hospitalized and they read each other’s diaries.

  • Stop the Sun

    Grade 7-8 Story by Gary Paulsen. An adolescent boy is uncomfortable with and embarrassed by his father’s unusual behavioral lapses, which his mother describes as “Vietnam Syndrome”. In talking with his father, he comes to understand a little of the brutality of war and its traumatic after-effects on veterans.

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