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
H. G. Wells After five years and most of his fortune, Monson must decide whether his flying machine is ready—or whether ridicule has forced the decision.
More details H. G. Wells A neglected shopkeeper discovers that a crystal egg offers a living view of another world—and that its inhabitants may be watching back.
More details H. G. Wells A confident rural army meets an enemy weapon built to cross trenches, resist rifles, and turn courage into a tactical liability.
More details H. G. Wells A physiologist’s new stimulant speeds thought and movement so radically that the outside world seems frozen in time.
More details H. G. Wells A chemistry accident sends an ordinary schoolmaster into a shadow world that overlaps the lives of everyone he knew.
More details H. G. Wells A laboratory accident blinds Davidson to London and replaces it with a vivid view of a remote island that may be more than hallucination.
More details H. G. Wells A new star grows brighter each night, and one mathematician realizes that its path will bring catastrophe to Earth.
More details H. G. Wells A nervous visitor steals a scientist’s deadliest culture and races across London with catastrophe—and fame—on his mind.
More details H. G. Wells A London psychical researcher leaves his body during an experiment—and returns to find it occupied by something else.
More details H. P. Lovecraft A young asylum doctor tests a homemade telepathic device on a violent sleepwalker whose dreams describe worlds far beyond Earth.
More details H. P. Lovecraft A struggling writer befriends a reclusive doctor who can survive only in a refrigerated room, then learns why the cold is essential.
More details H. P. Lovecraft A young scholar traces his family's troubled history from a decaying English estate to a ruined city deep in the Congo.
More details H. P. Lovecraft A scientist activates a machine that reveals forms of life hidden beside us, trapping his former friend in the experiment.
More details H. P. Lovecraft A traveling showman arrives with electrical marvels and visions that draw a restless city toward a night of collective terror.
More details H. P. Lovecraft An Irish landowner plans to drain a bog that local villagers refuse to disturb, then replaces every worker who leaves.
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 Three Terran agents flee Mars with a stolen city hidden among office supplies, but one fellow passenger asks too many questions.
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 Ray Bradbury A terrified Mars-bound crewman is given a mental refuge so convincing that his childhood memories become the only world he can see.
More details Ray Bradbury In a crime-free future, a pulp writer discovers that a perfect society has left him dangerously short of material.
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 Stranded on an asteroid with minutes of oxygen left, a patrolman and his camera-obsessed partner confront monsters that may exist only in the mind.
More details Ray Bradbury After a catastrophic time-machine demonstration, an inventor is condemned to become the living pendulum of the device he built.
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