The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins GilmanPrescribed total rest in a nursery with barred windows, a young wife begins to study the wallpaper.
28 min · Unsettling
The story shelf
Follow your curiosity.
A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
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
A Simple Enquiry
Ernest HemingwayIn a snowbound military hut, a major’s seemingly casual questions expose the dangerous private anxieties beneath his authority.
5 min · Unsettling
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
The Battler
Ernest HemingwayAfter being thrown from a freight train, Nick Adams finds food and company beside a campfire—but the prizefighter waiting there is not safe.
13 min · Unsettling
The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife
Ernest HemingwayA doctor’s claim to some driftwood is challenged by the lumberman who knows exactly where the logs came from.
6 min · Unsettling
Up in Michigan
Ernest HemingwayIn a small Michigan town, Liz Coates builds a private romance around the blacksmith whose return from a hunting trip changes everything.
9 min · Melancholy
Transformation
Mary ShelleyExiled by his own pride, a reckless nobleman accepts a stranger's miraculous bargain.
32 min · Chilling
A Municipal Report
O. HenryA traveling journalist arrives in supposedly uneventful Nashville and discovers that its quiet streets conceal tangled loyalties and danger.
28 min · Humorous
The Furnished Room
O. HenryA young man searching for a vanished singer rents a decaying room whose lingering traces seem to answer his longing.
11 min · Melancholy
Asleep in Armageddon
Ray BradburyStranded on a seemingly hospitable planetoid, a spaceman discovers that the only danger comes when he tries to sleep.
20 min · Chilling
Defense Mech
Ray BradburyA terrified Mars-bound crewman is given a mental refuge so convincing that his childhood memories become the only world he can see.
20 min · Suspenseful
Don’t Get Technatal
Ray BradburyIn a crime-free future, a pulp writer discovers that a perfect society has left him dangerously short of material.
4 min · Humorous
I, Mars
Ray BradburySixty years after being stranded on Mars, an old man receives a phone call from the younger self he recorded to survive the silence.
14 min · Melancholy
Pillar of Fire
Ray BradburyIn 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.
62 min · Eerie
Zero Hour
Ray BradburyAcross peaceful future suburbs, children take up a new game called Invasion—and their parents cannot decide whether to take it seriously.
14 min · Foreboding
Lice
Ryūnosuke AkutagawaOn a crowded war-bound ship in 1864, a plague of lice gives two samurai factions something more urgent to fight about.
9 min · Humorous
Rashōmon
Ryūnosuke AkutagawaIn a ruined Kyoto gate, a hungry servant encounters a stranger whose desperate act forces him to decide what survival permits.
12 min · Eerie
The Handkerchief
Ryūnosuke AkutagawaA university professor receives a bereaved mother whose composed manner appears to embody the ideal he has made of Japanese restraint.
15 min · Reflective
The Nose
Ryūnosuke AkutagawaA Buddhist priest’s determined campaign to shorten his extraordinary nose brings him the attention he thought he wanted—and a new humiliation.
13 min · Humorous
The Wine Worm
Ryūnosuke AkutagawaA Chinese landowner who can drink without ever growing drunk submits to an eccentric monk’s treatment for the creature said to live inside him.
14 min · Dreamlike
21 stories