Bestiario


Julio Cortázar - 1951
    These stories that speak about objects and daily happenings, pass over to another dimension, one of nightmare or revelation. In each text, surprise and uneasiness are ingredients added to the indescribable pleasure of its reading. These stories may upset readers due to a very rare characteristic in literature: They stare at us as if waiting for something in return. After reading these true classics, our opinion of the world cannot remain the same.1. "Casa Tomada" ("House Taken Over")2. " Carta a una señorita en París" (Letter to a Young Lady in Paris")3. "Lejana" ("The Distances")4. "Ómnibus" ("Omnibus")5. "Cefalea" ("Headache")6. "Circe" ("Circe")7. "Las puertas del cielo" ("The Gates of Heaven")8. "Bestiario" ("Bestiary")

The Oval Portrait


Edgar Allan Poe - 1842
    The oddly shaped room is full of paintings, and on his pillow the man finds a small book that appears to tell their stories. One painting in particular, of a beautiful girl, holds him spellbound, and, consulting the history book, he learns the startling secret of the oval portrait’s extraordinary execution.A pioneer of the short story genre, Edgar Allan Poe’s stories typically captured themes of the macabre and included elements of the mysterious. His better-known stories include “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “The Pit and the Pendulum”, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”.HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

A Sound of Thunder


Ray Bradbury - 1951
    Free online fiction.The short story, A Sound of Thunder, involves a Time Travel Safari where rich businessmen pay to travel back to prehistoric times and hunt real live dinosaurs.

Aura


Carlos Fuentes - 1962
    There Felipe meets her beautiful green-eyed niece, Aura. His passion for Aura and his gradual discovery of the true relationship between the young woman and her aunt propel the story to its extraordinary conclusion.

Strange Pilgrims


Gabriel García Márquez - 1992
    In Vienna, a woman parlays her gift for seeing the future into a fortunetelling position with a wealthy family. In Geneva, an ambulance driver and his wife take in the lonely, apparently dying ex-President of a Caribbean country, only to discover that his political ambition is very much intact. In these twelve masterful short stories about the lives of Latin Americans in Europe, García Márquez conveys the peculiar amalgam of melancholy, tenacity, sorrow, and aspiration that is the émigré experience.

From Beyond


H.P. Lovecraft - 1934
    P. Lovecraft. It was written in 1920 and was first published in The Fantasy Fan in June 1934 (Vol. 1, No. 10).The story is told from the first person perspective of an unnamed narrator and details his experiences with a scientist named Crawford Tillinghast. Tillinghast creates an electronic device that emits a resonance wave, which stimulates an affected person’s pineal gland, thereby allowing them to perceive planes of existence outside the scope of accepted reality.

The Old Man Who Read Love Stories


Luis Sepúlveda - 1988
    But tourists and opportunists are making inroads into the area, and the balance of nature is making a dangerous shift. Translated by Peter Bush.

The Invention of Morel


Adolfo Bioy Casares - 1940
    Set on a mysterious island, Bioy’s novella is a story of suspense and exploration, as well as a wonderfully unlikely romance, in which every detail is at once crystal clear and deeply mysterious.Inspired by Bioy Casares’s fascination with the movie star Louise Brooks, The Invention of Morel has gone on to live a secret life of its own. Greatly admired by Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and Octavio Paz, the novella helped to usher in Latin American fiction’s now famous postwar boom. As the model for Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad, it also changed the history of film.

A Hunger Artist


Franz Kafka - 1924
    He edited the manuscript just before his death, and these four stories are some of his best known and most powerful work, marking his maturity as a writer. In addition to "First Sorrow," "A Little Woman," and "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse People" is the title story, "A Hunger Artist," which has been called by the critic Heinz Politzer "a perfection, a fatal fulfillment that expresses Kafka's desire for permanence." The three volumes Twisted Spoon Press has published: Contemplation, A Country Doctor, and A Hunger Artist are the collections of stories that Kafka had published during his lifetime. Though each volume has its own distinctive character, they have most often appeared in English in collected editions. They are presented here as separate editions, in new translations by Kevin Blahut, each with its own illustrator from the Prague community.

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas


Ursula K. Le Guin - 1973
    Some inhabitants of a peaceful kingdom cannot tolerate the act of cruelty that underlies its happiness.The story "Omelas" was first published in New Dimensions 3, a hard-cover science fiction anthology edited by Robert Silverberg, in October 1973, and the following year it won Le Guin the prestigious Hugo Award for best short story.It was subsequently printed in her short story collection The Wind's Twelve Quarters in 1975.

Bartleby the Scrivener


Herman Melville - 1853
    Set in the mid-19th century on New York City's Wall Street, it was also, perhaps, Herman Melville's most prescient story: what if a young man caught up in the rat race of commerce finally just said, "I would prefer not to"?The tale is one of the final works of fiction published by Melville before, slipping into despair over the continuing critical dismissal of his work after Moby-Dick, he abandoned publishing fiction. The work is presented here exactly as it was originally published in Putnam's magazine—to, sadly, critical disdain.

The Swimmer


John Cheever - 1964
    But as night falls and the season begins to change, Neddy sinks from optimistic bliss to utter despair.

Harrison Bergeron


Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - 1961
    Because of Amendments 211, 212, and 213 to the Constitution, every American is fully equal, meaning that no one is stupider, uglier, weaker, or slower than anyone else. The Handicapper General and a team of agents ensure that the laws of equality are enforced.One April, fourteen-year-old Harrison Bergeron is taken away from his parents, George and Hazel, by the government.

The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories


Horacio Quiroga - 1909
    They span many fiction genres; jungle tale, Gothic horror story, psychological study, and morality tale- and possess a universality that has made him a classic Latin American writer.Horacio Quiroga was a master storyteller and author of over two hundred pieces of Latin American fiction that have been compared to the works of Poe, Kipling, and London. Like his stories, his own life from his birth in Uruguay to his suicide in Argentina was filled with adventure, tragedy, and violence.

Winter Dreams


F. Scott Fitzgerald - 1922
    It was during those three days that, for the first time, he had asked her to marry him. She said "maybe some day," she said "kiss me," she said "I'd like to marry you," she said "I love you"--she said-- nothing.