A Pursuit Race
Ernest HemingwayA failing advance man hides beneath a hotel sheet while alcohol and drugs turn his last escape into a grotesque pursuit he cannot outrun.
7 min · Bleak
The story shelf
Follow your curiosity.
A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
A Very Short Story
Ernest HemingwayA wounded soldier and a nurse fall in love in wartime Milan, trying to make a future together before the front and the armistice pull them apart.
3 min · Tragic
An Alpine Idyll
Ernest HemingwayAfter the thaw, a peasant brings his wife’s body down from the mountains—and the villagers reveal the grotesque ritual he performed while waiting.
9 min · Chilling
Banal Story
Ernest HemingwayA writer reads a magazine’s promises of Romance while, far away, a famous bullfighter dies and is reduced to souvenir pictures.
3 min · Humorous
In Another Country
Ernest HemingwayIn a Milan hospital after the fighting, wounded soldiers submit their bodies to machines while trying to imagine who they will be afterward.
10 min · Melancholy
In Our Time: Interchapters
Ernest HemingwayWar, revolution, bullfights, and executions flash past in hard-edged scenes where courage and brutality become nearly indistinguishable.
12 min · Chilling
Indian Camp
Ernest HemingwayA boy accompanies his doctor father across a dark lake to help a woman in labor, entering a night of pain, birth, and adult mystery.
7 min · Unsettling
Soldier’s Home
Ernest HemingwayA veteran returns to his Oklahoma home after the war and finds that the town, his family, and the future they expect no longer fit him.
13 min · Bleak
Today Is Friday
Ernest HemingwayAfter the crucifixion, three Roman soldiers drink, joke, and circle the question of what it means to endure suffering.
5 min · Bleak
An Unfinished Story
O. HenryA shopgirl living on six dollars a week faces the glittering promise of dinner and the danger hidden behind it.
11 min · Bleak
Holding Up a Train
O. HenryA former Southwestern outlaw explains how train robberies work—and why the life is not worth the price.
21 min · Suspenseful
The Roads We Take
O. HenryAfter a daring train robbery, two partners must decide who gets the only horse capable of carrying them away.
8 min · Suspenseful
The Pendulum
Ray BradburyAfter a catastrophic time-machine demonstration, an inventor is condemned to become the living pendulum of the device he built.
8 min · Bleak
13 stories