Reading list
The most famous short stories, free to read
Most famous short stories live inside collections, which makes them oddly hard to find. Here each one is listed with the book that holds it, and where a story has its own page you can read how it begins first, like The Necklace or The Gift of the Magi.
22 books, all free to read
They are ranked by fame and by how well they still work. A short story takes ten to forty minutes, so this is a list you can finish.
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1. Short Fiction The Necklace
by Guy de Maupassant
A borrowed necklace is lost and a life is spent paying for it. The twist ending everyone remembers.
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2. Short Fiction The Gift of the Magi
by O. Henry
A young couple, two gifts and one Christmas. O. Henry's most loved story.
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3. Short Fiction The Tell-Tale Heart and The Cask of Amontillado
by Edgar Allan Poe
Poe's murderers, both calm and both mad. Each takes about fifteen minutes.
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4. The Yellow Wallpaper
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
A woman confined to a room starts to see someone behind the wallpaper. The most taught American short story.
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5. The Lady of the Barge The Monkey's Paw
by W. W. Jacobs
Three wishes, each worse than the last. The perfect horror story.
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6. The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
by Washington Irving
Irving's two American legends: a man who sleeps twenty years, and a headless horseman.
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7. Short Fiction The Death of Ivan Ilyich
by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy on dying, and on living. Long for a story, short for a life.
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8. Lost Face To Build a Fire
by Jack London
A man and a dog in seventy-five below zero. A story about cold you can feel.
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9. Short Fiction The Story of an Hour
by Kate Chopin
A woman hears that her husband has died. Three pages, and a famous last line.
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10. In the Midst of Life An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
by Ambrose Bierce
A man about to be hanged from a bridge in the Civil War. One of the first great twist endings.
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11. Dubliners The Dead
by James Joyce
Fifteen Dublin stories ending with a party, a song and snow falling all over Ireland.
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12. Short Fiction The Lady with the Dog
by Anton Chekhov
An affair at a seaside resort that turns into love. Chekhov's most perfect story.
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13. Short Fiction The Overcoat and The Nose
by Nikolai Gogol
A poor clerk's coat, a runaway nose. Gogol's comic, sad St Petersburg.
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14. Children’s Stories The Happy Prince
by Oscar Wilde
A statue and a swallow give away a city's gold. Wilde's fairy tales make adults cry.
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15. Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories The Canterville Ghost
by Oscar Wilde
An American family buys an English castle and refuses to be frightened by its ghost.
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16. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes The Speckled Band
by Arthur Conan Doyle
Holmes's greatest short case, and a locked room with a whistle in the night.
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17. Short Fiction The Call of Cthulhu
by H. P. Lovecraft
The story that started a mythology. Something sleeps under the Pacific.
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18. The Garden Party, and Other Stories The Garden Party
by Katherine Mansfield
A party on the day a neighbour dies. Mansfield's most famous story.
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19. Short Fiction The Open Window
by Saki
Saki's wicked little tales, with the best last line in English short fiction.
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20. Short Fiction Rashomon and In a Grove
by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke
Akutagawa's stories behind Kurosawa's film: one crime, several truths.
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21. Short Fiction
by Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway's early stories, where what is left out matters most.
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22. Short Fiction Bartleby, the Scrivener
by Herman Melville
A copyist who would prefer not to. Funny, and then very sad.
More lists
Read them free
Every book on this list is free in Doomreader: open one and it reads as short posts you scroll, with your place kept and its best pages a tap away. You can listen to any of them free too, read aloud by your device.