Classic Literature Short Stories

This audiobook, read by Audie award-winning narrators, includes unabridged recordings of over 120 of Twain's inventive, humorous, and most-loved short stories.

Here is the preface to 12 magnificent stories, originally part of The John Cheever Audio Collection, in which John Cheever celebrates - with unequaled grace and tenderness - the deepest feelings we have.

"The Nose" is the second best known story of Gogol, after "The Overcoat". A military major discovers his nose is missing and works to recover it. He finds the nose but it pretends to have a life of its own, as a fellow human. It in fact has a higher rank than the Major himself. The Major is perplexed, goes back to his apartment, and has the nose returned to him. With great joy he recovers his nose, only to find it won't reattach to his face. After much going on, he finds the nose reattached to his face.

"The Horse Dealer's Daughter" is a story gripping in its content. It encompasses the terror of death and disgrace, which is redeemed by passion and sexuality. The question Lawrence leaves open is whether the doctor's avowal of love is genuine or driven by the awakening of his own sexuality and pity for the woman.

"My father was in the hospital and every night when I visited him, I read aloud to him. James Thurber. And one night he said, 'You really should do that on your show,' and I said, 'Dad, it’s a television newscast. I’d love to, but how could it possibly fit?' And he said, 'How often have I ever suggested anything for your shows?' And I remembered that he never had. But I also reminded him that there were things like copyrights and bills, to which he said, 'Try it. You never know.'"

Life has the capacity of great moments and attainment, of lives well lived, fulfilling for ourselves and for those we touch. But for others life is arduous. There is no spark to ignite the curiosity, to explore and achieve a stability and a growth to their lives. Indeed their lives, in their own eyes, become almost meaningless, their sense of themselves subsumed under a myriad of problems, whether real or imagined. Seismic events in a life might crush them; the loss of a loved one for instance. Coping is difficult, support hard to find and isolation abounds.

The Damned & Other Stories of the Macabre is Skyboat Media’s second original compilation of stories by Algernon Blackwood, featuring six of his most unique and macabre stories that contemplate the true meaning of reality and nature of the making of the world.

Today, nearly 40 years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures. We have begun publishing his many works for the first time as Penguin Classics. This season we continue with the seven spectacular and influential books East of Eden, Cannery Row, In Dubious Battle, The Long Valley, The Moon Is Down, The Pastures of Heaven, and Tortilla Flat.

Gertrude Stein’s pioneering triptych Three Lives portrays the lives of three working-class women in the fictional American town of Bridgepoint (Baltimore). A progenitor of the "stream of consciousness" technique later adopted by Joyce and Woolf, Stein takes us into the minds of three distinct women, who are each trapped in their societal positions. "The Good Anna" follows a stern but kind German immigrant, "Melanctha" the tragic life of an African-American woman of the same name, and "The Gentle Lena" a dreamy and unopinionated servant whose passiveness becomes her undoing.

Tadeusz Borowski’s concentration camp stories were based on his own experiences surviving Auschwitz and Dachau. In spare, brutal prose he describes a world where where the will to survive overrides compassion, and prisoners eat, work, and sleep a few yards from where others are murdered; where the difference between human beings is reduced to a second bowl of soup, an extra blanket, or the luxury of a pair of shoes with thick soles; and where the line between normality and abnormality vanishes.

In these selections, an animal plays an important role in the action or plot of the story. The animals in these stories are real or are stand-ins for humans: Sredni Vashtar by Saki (H. H. Munro) Kholstomer, The Story of a Horse by Leo Tolstoy A Dark-Brown Dog by Stephen Crane Kashtanka by Anton Chekhov The Cat That Walked By Himself by Rudyard Kipling The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe The Fly by Katherine Mansfield The Boar-Pig by Saki (H. H. Munro) The Tiger Guest by Pu Songlbying Jackals and Arabs by Franz Kafka

From best-selling authors Ilona Andrews, Yasmine Galenorn, Allyson James, and Jeanne C. Stein comes an anthology of four all-new novellas featuring powerful women who know how to handle a hex or two. In "Double Hexed" from Allyson James, a novella of the Stormwalker series, Janet and her friends find themselves locked in her hotel, victims of a hex cast by a very powerful sorcerer.

This audiobook contains 17 short stories inspired from famous classic fairy tales. In addition to 17 classic tales, you’ll get another three bonus stories from Aesop’s Fables book.

Three works of fiction, two by Mary Wollstonecraft, and one by her daughter Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein. In Mary Wollstonecraft's Mary, the heroine flees her young husband in order to nurse her dearest friend, Ann, and finds genuine love, while Maria tells of a desperate young woman who seeks consolation in the arms of another man after the loss of her child. And Mary Shelley's Matilda - suppressed for more than a century - tells the story of a woman alienated from society by the incestuous passion of her father.

For The Penguin Book of Murder Mysteries, writer and anthologist Michael Sims did not summon the usual suspects. He sought the unfamiliar, the unjustly forgotten, and little-known gems by writers from outside the genre. This historical tour of one of our most popular literary categories includes stories never before reprinted, features rebellious early “lady detectives," and spotlights former stars of the crime field—Austrian novelist Auguste Groner and prolific American Geraldine Bonner among them.

Paru en 1887 avec d'autres récits, "Le Horla" est incontestablement le plus original et le plus effrayant de tous les contes fantastiques de Maupassant. Pour l'écrire, l'auteur s'est documenté auprès du docteur Charcot, célèbre spécialiste des névroses et des hystéries. Mais surtout, il s'est probablement inspiré des troubles nerveux qui commençaient alors à le détruire et qui allaient bientôt l'empoter.

A fourth floor room, a door locked with the key inside, no way in, no way out. Edgar Allan Poe is the true grandfather of the murder mystery. Decades before Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, Poe gave us C. Auguste Dupin, a man able to solve mysteries through observation and deduction.

One abandoned, one unfinished, these short works show Austen equally at home with romance (a widowed clergyman with four daughters must needs be in search of a husband or two in The Watsons) and with social change (a new, commercial seaside resort in Sanditon). Typically touching, funny, charming and sharp.

Kate Croy is secretly engaged to Merton Denscher, a journalist who lacks money. By chance, Kate befriends Milly, an American heiress, and learns she is suffering from a fatal illness. Kate devises a scheme to maximize their combined assets: she encourages Merton to take an interest in Milly and marry her. Kate intends to make him a rich widower whom she herself can marry. But such well-laid plans are not enough for the subtlety of the heart.

Queen Marguerite de Navarre was one of the most powerful women of her age. Her masterpiece, The Heptameron, is a collection of some 72 stories told by five gentlemen and five ladies who find themselves stranded in an abbey. Proposed as an edifying way of passing the time while a bridge is being repaired, the tale-telling - as well as the conversations that follow each story - quickly becomes a battle of wits between the sexes, with tales concerning illicit lovers, romantic conquests, lecherous monks, manly honor, and women's virtue.