The End of Something – General Understanding Quiz

Other stories you may like:

See top menu for all 1,500+ stories

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

Hominids
Short Story by Jill McCorkle. A woman is disgusted by the way a group of men joke about the bodies of women they had encountered at a strip club earlier in the day. She confronts the men, cynically threatening to open her own club called “Peckers”.
The Boarded Window
Short Story by Ambrose Bierce. A grieving and possibly PTSD affected man shows no sign of traditional mourning over his wife’s death. His decision to shut himself off from the outside world could well result from a sense of shame and/or guilt over his part in her death.
Everything That Rises Must Converge
Short Story by Flannery O’connor. A bigoted woman living in the past and her disrespectful, "intellectual" son have different ideas on racial integration in the American South. The unfortunate climax comes when the mother insults her African-American doppelganger by offering the woman’s young child a penny.

The Feathered Ogre
Italian Folktale. A dying king is told that his only hope for a cure is a magical feather from a feared ogre known to kill any human it sees. When no one else volunteers to face the creature, one of his most loyal and courageous attendants steps forward.
Hitting Budapest
Short Story by NoViolet Bulawayo. Six hungry children from an African slum cross town to steal fruit from the guava trees of a rich neighborhood. Returning home they a woman’s body hanging from a tree. Before reporting it, they remove her shoes to sell for a loaf of bread.
The True Story of Kanakapala, Protector of Gold
Short Story by Raja Rao. A tale spanning three generations about Kanakapala, a huge cobra that guarded a buried treasure bestowed upon Lord Shiva and the goddess Vishalakshi. The loyal serpent literally “met its end” when its powers proved ineffective against rogue descendants of the treasure’s donor.
The Dead Past
Novelette by Isaac Assimov. A young physicist builds a home “chronoscope” that can look back in time up to one hundred and fifty years. Too late, the government tries to censor his work, pointing out its potential to destroy an important aspect of life everyone takes for granted.

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.
The Cone
Short Story by H. G. Wells. The manager of an iron-works takes an artist friend he knows to be sleeping with his wife on a personal tour of the furnaces. It seems inevitable that one of them will meet with an 'accident'. The question is, which one will it be?
Under the Banyan Tree
Short Story by R. K. Narayan. Set in India at a time when oral tales were the only form of regular entertainment, an aging storyteller is becoming forgetful and has difficulty coming up with new material. Fortunately, he has the good sense to make his 'greatest' story his last.