Short Story Books

The Arabian Nights Entertainments

Anonymous

It's been called The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, One Thousand and One Nights, etc., but the framework is generally the same: a Persian king discovers his wife is cheating, so, having determined th..

Aesop's Fables

Aesop

Aesop was a Greek slave who lived during the 5th century BC, and his fables, like the "Tortoise and the Hare," the "Boy who Cried Wolf," and the "Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs," are known all over t..

Grimms' Fairy Tales

The Grimm Brothers

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, or the Brothers Grimm, were born in Hanau Germany in the late 1700s. They were well known scholars who made popular a multitude of European folk and fairy tales that had until..

Canterbury Tales and Other Poems

Geoffrey Chaucer

Chaucer is considered by some to be the Father of English Literature, and the Canterbury Tales is his magnum opus. It is a frame story - a collection of stories contained by a larger one - written in ..

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad

A compelling story reaching into the unspoken depths of the place in man's soul where, sometimes, greatness seems both noble and tragic. The most beautifully-written, memorable and perhaps meaningful ..

The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka's novella The Metamorphosis, published in 1915, opens with one of the most famous lines in fiction: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in hi..

Flatland

Edwin A. Abbott

Edwin Abbott Abbott's satirical 1884 novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, is "on the surface" an examination of multiple dimensions. Its author, writing anonymously as "A Square" takes us o..

Twelve Men

Theodore Dreiser

Although world-famous for his novels Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, Theodore Dreiser was also highly accomplished in journalism, autobiography, and travel writing. In 1919, having recently accepte..