Classic Literature Short Stories

Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time provides listeners a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story following lead character Nick Adams through a series of short stories around the time of World War I. It was praised by fellow authors John Dos Passos and F. Scott Fitzgerald for its precision and simplicity in its messaging. With gruff prose and blunt dialogue that would become standards of his career, it established Hemingway as one of the most promising young American writers of his era.

This holiday bundle features six entertaining and delightful audio stories for the whole family to enjoy year-round. Perfect for the audiobook lovers on your list! Each story is performed by a full cast of voice actors with sound effects and music. Includes Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, The Bell by Hans Christian Andersen, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, Cinderella by Charles Perrault, Snow White by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.

The master storyteller amuses and entertains with a collection of stories which includes: "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg", "The Double Barrelled Detective Story", "The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County", "The Million Dollar Bank Note", "Benton and Mills", "A Tale", "Cannibalism in the Cars", "The Stolen White Elephant", "The Man Who Put Up at Gadsby's", "The Good Little Boy", "The Bad Little Boy", and "Baker's Blue Jay Yarn".

In this captivating collection of stories by the author of Ballet Shoes, there are auditions on stage and antics on ice, trips to the pantomime, holiday adventures and laughter shared with family and friends. Charming, heartwarming and funny, this collection will bring joy to listeners of all ages. Originally written in the 1940s-'60s for annuals, magazines and the radio, these stories have never been collected before.

A poor young couple demonstrates the meaning of love and self-sacrifice in the Christmas Classic, "The Gift of the Magi". Also included is "The Last Leaf". This tale follows a young woman artist who is stricken with pneumonia. She watches the leafy vine opposite her window with hollow eyes, and she determines to stay alive until the last leaf falls. O. Henry, always a master with the surprise ending, delivers two fine tales of his beloved New York City.

This collection comprises stories by and inspired by the originators of weird fiction. From Allen's "The Arctic Death", through to Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", Stoker's "Dracula's Guest", and beyond. Time immemorial; worlds unimaginable.

From a variety of masterfully rendered perspectives, these six stories depict people at painful odds with the world around them. A wife can only surrender to a desert night by betraying her husband. An artist struggles to honor his own aspirations as well as society's expectations of him. A missionary brutally converted to the worship of a tribal fetish is left with but an echo of his identity. Whether set in North Africa, Paris, or Brazil, the stories in Exile and the Kingdom are probing portraits of spiritual exile, and man's perpetual search for an inner kingdom.

When Sergeant Major Morris brings a mummified monkey’s paw to the White family, they embrace it as a morbid curiosity. When they learn that an old Fakir has enchanted the paw, they continue to treat the thing lightly. But the workings of the paw, once set in motion, cannot be undone, no matter what they try.

With this, his first collection of stories, Raymond Carver breathed new life into the American short story and instantly became both the recognized master of the form and one of our best-loved fiction writers. Carver shows us the humor and tragedy that dwell in the hearts of ordinary people; his stories are the classics of our time.

He's the ass-kicking, wise-cracking, hard-drinking demon hunter you never knew you needed. He's Quincy Harker, and he's here to save your ass whether you want it or not. The immortal magic-wielding son of Jonathan Harker and Mina Murray from the classic novel Dracula, Harker now lives in North Carolina hunting down demons and sending them back to Hell. This Omnibus Edition collects the first 12 novellas in the Quincy Harker series.

Qui est cet inconnu capable d'en remontrer au grand Czentovic, le champion mondial des échecs, véritable prodige aussi fruste qu'antipathique ? Peut-on croire, comme il l'affirme, qu'il n'a pas joué depuis plus de vingt ans ? Les circonstances dans lesquelles l'homme a acquis sa science du jeu sont terribles. Elles renvoient aux expérimentations nazies sur les effets de l'isolement absolu, lorsque, aux frontières de la folie, le cerveau humain parvient à déployer ses facultés les plus étranges.

This is a collection of stories about interesting, unusual, bright human characters and destinies. Contents: Gusev by Anton Chekhov ; Boule de Suif by Guy De Maupassant ; Alyosha the Pot by Leo Tolstoy ; Mateo Falcone by Prosper Mérimée ; Little Brother by Mary E. Mann ; Bartleby, The Scrivener by Herman Melville ; The Lightning-Rod Man by Herman Melville ; The Ambitious Guest by Nathaniel Hawthorne ; The Darling by Anton Chekhov ; A Simple Heart by Gustave Flaubert

A chilling short story from the author of Dracula. In the Valley of the Shadow is a tale about a delirious man and his hallucinations while hospitalized.

These stories display Twain's place in American letters as a master writer in the authentic native idiom. He was exuberant and irreverent, but underlying the humor was a vigorous desire for social justice and a pervasive equalitarian attitude.

"Chekhov is probably better known in Britain for his plays than for his prose. For many, however, it is his short stories that mark the high water of his genius. It might at first glance be hard for those not used to his style of narrative to see what the fuss is about - and fuss there is: for most authors and lovers of literature Chekhov is incomparably the greatest short story writer there ever was."

The stories in this volume, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout, are tales of families trying to heal their wounds, save their marriages, and rescue their children. In "Ralph the Duck," a security guard struggles to hang on to his marriage. In "Name the Name," a traveling teacher attends to students outside the school, including his own son, locked in a country jail. In Busch's work, we are reminded that we have no idea what goes on behind closed doors or in the mind of another.

For listeners who are tired of Christmas commercialism, or who feel that Santa Claus and reindeer don’t tell the whole story, these classic gems provide a winning alternative. Selected for their insightfulness, spiritual value, and literary quality (nothing moralistic here) they project the spirit of the season in a fresh, compelling manner that will resonate with listeners of all ages - from children too young to read to themselves, to parents and grandparents who enjoy listening to stories, as well.

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.

Though The Arabian Nights are generally known as stories for children, they were originally tales for adults full of adventure, sexuality, violence, and the supernatural. They certainly inspired the imagination of Sir Richard Burton, the 19th century explorer, linguist, and erotologist who brought all his worldly experience and superbly expressive prose style to bear on the tales of Sindbad the Seaman and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.

A newly married woman longs, irrationally, for a silk umbrella, a husband chases away his wife's beloved cat, a betrayed mother impulsively sacks her housekeeper. Underneath the surface of these precisely observed tales of love, marriage and family life in mid-century Copenhagen pulse currents of desire, violence and despair, as women and men dream of escaping their conventional roles and finding freedom and happiness - without ever truly understanding what that might mean.