The story shelf
Follow your curiosity. A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
GenreEvery kind of story Adventure & peril Fantasy & wonder Folklore, myth & moral tales Historical & war Horror & supernatural Humor & satire Love & romance Mystery & crime Realist & social Science fiction Reading timeAny length Under 10 minutes Under 15 minutes Under 30 minutes Under 40 minutes MoodAny mood Adventurous Bittersweet Bleak Chilling Claustrophobic Cozy Dreamlike Eerie Foreboding Hopeful Humorous Melancholy Nostalgic Playful Reflective Romantic Solemn Suspenseful Tender Tragic Unsettling Wondrous AuthorAll authors Ambrose Bierce Anton Chekhov Charlotte Perkins Gilman Clifford D. Simak Cordwainer Smith Edgar Allan Poe Ernest Hemingway Guy de Maupassant H. G. Wells H. P. Lovecraft Herman Melville Jack London James Joyce Kate Chopin Mary Shelley O. Henry P. G. Wodehouse Philip K. Dick Ray Bradbury Robert Sheckley Ryūnosuke Akutagawa Walter M. Miller Jr. Washington Irving
P. G. Wodehouse An artist needs his wealthy uncle's approval to marry, so Bertie brings in Jeeves to find a way past the man's stubbornness.
More details P. G. Wodehouse Determined to solve a problem without Jeeves, Bertie devises a plan to help Bingo win Honoria Glossop—and avoid her himself.
More details P. G. Wodehouse A poet who hates New York must send his aunt lively reports from its nightlife to keep the allowance that lets him stay in the country.
More details P. G. Wodehouse Biffy has lost the woman he loves and is engaged to another. Bertie’s rescue plan takes them to a crowded exhibition.
More details P. G. Wodehouse After a Boat Race night arrest, Bertie poses as his jailed friend at a Cambridge house full of people he'd rather avoid.
More details Philip K. Dick A dying professor lends his brain to an experimental warship, and the machine begins making decisions its creators never authorized.
More details Philip K. Dick When soldiers on a remote asteroid declare themselves plants, a psychiatrist enters the woods to find who taught them.
More details Philip K. Dick A major crosses a ruined battlefield to negotiate peace, unaware that the autonomous weapons around him have learned to look human.
More details Philip K. Dick After eight years underground, three men risk the radioactive surface and find the robots fighting their war have kept a secret.
More details Philip K. Dick Explorers land on a dead planet and discover that one weapon has outlived the civilization it was built to defend.
More details Philip K. Dick A condemned hunter is sent two centuries into the past to kill a religious founder, armed only with a gun and the target’s skull.
More details Philip K. Dick A Terran boy visits his alien friends on the day their people finally begin winning back a century of conquered worlds.
More details Ray Bradbury Stranded on a seemingly hospitable planetoid, a spaceman discovers that the only danger comes when he tries to sleep.
More details Ray Bradbury Sixty years after being stranded on Mars, an old man receives a phone call from the younger self he recorded to survive the silence.
More details Ray Bradbury An aging, disgraced navigator claims he can guide a vital supply ship through an asteroid belt after its computers fail.
More details Ray Bradbury A burned-out coroner on a space morgue ship gets one last chance to confront the war whose dead he has carried for a decade.
More details Ray Bradbury In a future that has abolished fear, graveyards, and the literature of horror, the last man from the dead rises to make the world afraid again.
More details Ray Bradbury On the eve of humanity’s first Moon rocket, the man who owns the launch company tries to stop a breakthrough he believes civilization is not ready to use.
More details Ray Bradbury On a world where people are born, grow old, and die within eight days, a boy races against his own lifetime to find a way beyond it.
More details Ray Bradbury After a catastrophic time-machine demonstration, an inventor is condemned to become the living pendulum of the device he built.
More details Ray Bradbury On a colonized, dying Mars, an exiled musician plays a tune that may summon a violent reckoning for Earth’s occupiers.
More details Ray Bradbury Across peaceful future suburbs, children take up a new game called Invasion—and their parents cannot decide whether to take it seriously.
More details Robert Sheckley Seekers from several species travel to a machine that knows everything, only to learn that knowledge depends on asking a valid question.
More details Robert Sheckley A man surrounded by labor-saving luxuries begins to question the debts that control his family’s future.
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