The Legend of Sleepy Hollow


Washington Irving - 1820
    He was a gullible and excitable fellow, often so terrified by locals' stories of ghosts that he would hurry through the woods on his way home, singing to keep from hysterics. Until late one night, he finds that maybe they're not just stories. What is that dark, menacing figure riding behind him on a horse? And what does it have in its hands? And why wasn't schoolteacher Crane ever seen in Sleepy Hollow again?

Desiree's Baby


Kate Chopin - 1893
    Today she is considered a forerunner of the feminist authors of the 20th century. This powerful little story concerns a Southern gentleman who disowns his wife because he fears she has "negro" blood. The truth makes for a dramatic ending.

The Lost Stories Of Louisa May Alcott


Louisa May Alcott - 1993
    From the author of anonymous and pseudonymous tales comes a collection on nine newly discovered stories uncovered by tireless literary detective work.

21 Short Tales


Franz Kafka - 2011
    Ranging from tiny sketches and prose poems to longer, more conventional narratives, the stories included here are:A Country Doctor - In the Gods - An Old Folio - Before the Law - Jackals and Arabs - A Visit to the Mine - The Next Village - An Imperial Message - A Paterfamilias Perplexed - Eleven Sons - A Fratricide - A Dream - Bucket Rider - Of Metaphors - The Silence of the Sirens - Gracchus the Hunter - The Knock on the Courtyard Door - Advocates - The Vulture - At Night - A Little Fable.This e-book has a total length of around 16,000 words.

Great Short Stories by American Women


Candace Ward - 1930
    The earliest stories are Rebecca Harding Davis' naturalistic "Life in the Iron Mills" (published in 1861 and predating Émile Zola's Germinal by almost 25 years) and Louisa May Alcott's semiautobiographical tale "Transcendental Wild Oats" (1873). The most recent ones are Zora Neale Hurston's "Sweat," an ironic tale of contested loyalty.In between is a grand cavalcade of superbly crafted fiction by Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Djuna Barnes, Susan Glaspell and Edith Wharton. Brief biographies of each of the writers are included.

The Collected Works of Noah Cicero Vol. I


Noah Cicero - 2013
    I" contains the early masterpieces by the greatest minimalist writer ever to hail from Youngstown, Ohio. Collecting Noah Cicero's most acclaimed and popular works, this volume includes the short novels "The Human War" (soon to be a major motion picture), "The Doomed," "The Condemned," and "Burning Babies," along with rare novellas and short stories that have not been available to the public in years. Stark in their beauty, raw in their sadness, and driven by a desperate compulsion to save - and be saved by - humanity, "The Collected Works of Noah Cicero Vol. I" highlights what it is to be young and poor in America. Buy this book and learn why freedom is good. Buy this book and become beautiful. Buy this book and know that the distance between you and happiness is the distance between you and the nearest Denny's. So get in the car and drive.

The Old Beauty, and others


Willa Cather - 1948
    A Czech immigrant who finds a paradoxical contentment on the harsh expanse of the Nebraska prairie. A solitary young painter spying raptly and guiltily on his exquisite neighbor. These are some of the lives that Willa Cather renders, with a fine balance of compassion and detachment, in these nineteen stories. Here are the great themes that Cather staked out like tracts of land: the plight of people hungry for beauty in a country that has no room for it; the mysterious arc of human lives; the ways in which the American frontier transformed the strangers who came to it, turning them imperceptibly into Americans. In these fictions, Cather displays her vast moral vision, her unerring sense of place, and her ability to find the one detail or episode that makes a closed life open wide in a single exhilarating moment.

To Build a Fire


Jack London - 1902
    A heartbreaking tale set in the vast wintry landscape of the North, it endures as one of the greatest adventures ever written.

Evangelista's Fan & Other Stories


Rose Tremain - 1994
    This collection-- dazzling, diverse, sophisticated-- demonstrates the enormous range of her talent between two camps-- alongside such contemporary issues as mortgage debt and medical error.

Twice-Told Tales


Nathaniel Hawthorne - 1837
    This volume collects many of his most famous short works and is a fitting compendium of his literary achievements for newcomers or longtime Hawthorne fans alike.

The Rats in the Walls


H.P. Lovecraft - 1924
    Lovecraft. Written in August–September 1923, it was first published in Weird Tales, March 1924.The story is narrated by the scion of the Delapore family, who has moved from Massachusetts to his ancestral estate in England, known as Exham Priory. On several occasions, the protagonist and his cats hear the sounds of rats scurrying behind the walls. Upon investigating further, he finds that his family maintained an underground city for centuries and that the inhabitants of the city fed on human flesh, even going so far as to raise generations of human cattle, who eventually began to de-evolve due to their sub-human living conditions.

Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom


Sylvia Plath - 2019
    'It is the kingdom of the frozen will,' comes the reply. 'There is no going back.'Sylvia Plath's strange, dark tale of independence over infanticide, written not long after she herself left home, grapples with mortality in motion.Bringing together past, present and future in our ninetieth year, Faber Stories is a celebratory compendium of collectable work.

The Devil's Church and Other Stories


Machado de Assis - 1977
    Collectively, these nineteen stories are representative of Machado's unique style and world view, and this translation doubles the number of his stories previously available in English.The stories in this volume reflect Machado's post-1880 emphasis on social satire and experimentation in psychological realism. If he had continued to produce the moralistic love stories and parlor intrigues of his earlier fiction, Machado's legacy would have been an entertaining but inconsequent body of work. However, by 1880 he had begun a devastating satirical assault on society through his fiction. In spite of his ruthlessness, Machado does at times reveal an ironic sympathy for his characters. He is not indifferent to human conflict but uses humor and irony to stress the absurdity of these conflicts, acted out against the backdrop of an indifferent universe. Such a spectacle creates a sense of helplessness that can only inspire wistful amusement.In his technical mastery of the short story. Machado was decades ahead of his contemporaries and can still be considered more modern than most of the modernists themselves. That his stories elicit such strong and diverse reactions today is a tribute to their richness, complexity, and significance.

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson


Emily Dickinson - 1890
    Early posthumously published collections-some of them featuring liberally “edited” versions of the poems-did not fully and accurately represent Dickinson’s bold experiments in prosody, her tragic vision, and the range of her intellectual and emotional explorations. Not until the 1955 publication of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, a three-volume critical edition compiled by Thomas H. Johnson, were readers able for the first time to assess, understand, and appreciate the whole of Dickinson’s extraordinary poetic genius.This book, a distillation of the three-volume Complete Poems, brings together the original texts of all 1,775 poems that Emily Dickinson wrote.

Leaves of Grass


Walt Whitman - 1855
    A collection of quintessentially American poems, the seminal work of one of the most influential writers of the nineteenth century.