Classic Literature Short Stories

Delight in the most wonderful time of the year with a collection of old-fashioned works from classic authors including L. M. Montgomery, Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens, and many more, who invite you to a feast of holiday nostalgia in this beautiful, giftable Christmas collection.

H. G. Wells was known as the father of science fiction, but his creative genius encompassed far more that a single literary genre. He was also a visionary, a satirist, a sociologist and an historian. This third audio anthology of H. G. Wells’ Short Stories produced by Raconteurs Audio in collaboration with Spoken Realms, brings together some his lesser known short stories.

These three short works show Austen experimenting with a variety of different literary styles, from melodrama to satire, and exploring a range of social classes and settings. The early epistolary novel Lady Susan depicts an unscrupulous coquette toying with the affections of several men. In contrast, The Watsons is a delightful fragment whose spirited heroine, Emma Watson, finds her marriage opportunities limited by poverty and pride....

This volume of Chekhov stories offers a unique selection, each touching upon fundamentally important subjects such as the purpose and value of life, what it takes to be human, eternal life and higher objectives of human life, happiness, guilt and romance.

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.

Sherlock Holmes was created by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Referring to himself as a "consulting detective" in the stories, Holmes is known for his proficiency with observation, deduction, forensic science, and logical reasoning that borders on the fantastic, which he employs when investigating cases for a wide variety of clients, including Scotland Yard. Holmes first appeared in print in 1887's A Study in Scarlet, the character's popularity became widespread with the first series of short stories in The Strand Magazine, beginning with "A Scandal in Bohemia" in 1891.

Celebrated Irish author Padraic Colum dazzled audiences with his retellings of old Gaelic myths. In The King of Ireland's Son, he imbues seven favorite tales from the Emerald Isle with sly humor, whimsy, and imagination.

It's just townspeople picking numbers for the annual lottery...why, then, is there an ominous feeling to "The Lottery"? Find out just what this lottery is for, and listen to seven other unique stories. The collection reveals Jackson's remarkable range, from hilarious to horrifying, dealing with modern issues of alienation, empowerment, racism, and economic class.

Can You Forgive Her? is the first of the six Palliser novels. Here Trollope examines parliamentary election and marriage, politics and privacy. As he dissects the Victorian upper class, issues and people shed their pretenses under his patient, ironic probe.

"White Nights" is one of Dostoyevsky's shorter works told from the standpoint of an ultimate introvert, brought briefly out of his shell by love. It might have been written 170 years ago, but certain aspects of it are very relatable to the modern listener, especially to those of us who gravitate toward solitude and introversion.

F. Scott Fitzgerald makes antebellum Baltimore his setting for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a fantastical tale with some Poe-like overtones about a baby born at age 70 who then lives life in reverse, his hair turning "in the dozen years of his life from white to iron-gray, the network of wrinkles on his face becoming less pronounced". What ramifications that creates for Benjamin's relationship with his father first and then later with his wife and his own son makes for some fantastical situations.

You are probably familiar with the popularized versions of Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, but have you ever heard the original, unabridged stories by Washington Irving? The skillfully written and colorful original tales have much more meaning and depth. In Rip Van Winkle Irving makes a profound social comment about the changes then happening in America.

Bawdy and exotic, Tales from the Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night features the wily, seductive Scheherazade, who saves her own life by telling tales of magical transformation, genies and wishes, flying carpets and fantastical journeys, terror and passion to entertain and appease the brutal King Shahryar.

When it comes to the holidays, no story captures the true spirit of giving like O. Henry’s classic "The Gift of the Magi". And in celebration of the season, Audie Award® winners Katherine Kellgren, Oliver Wyman, and Jonathan Davis bring to life this timeless Christmas tale, plus two more of O. Henry’s holiday gems: "The Cop and the Anthem" and "The Last Leaf".

What is the terrible secret at the heart of The King in Yellow? The forbidden play’s second act is said to drive all those who read it mad. And the sinister text casts its shadow of dread over Robert W. Chambers’s collection of weird, supernatural stories of the same name. Threaded with elements of fantasy, science fiction, the supernatural, and gothic horror, this cult classic continues to inspire the imagination of artists - from H. P. Lovecraft to the writers of HBO’s True Detective - and delight connoisseurs of the macabre.

In a remote part of 19th-century Afghanistan, two British adventurers pursue their ambition to rule an empire. Using betrayal, threats, and guns, they win the respect of a primitive tribe and become worshipped as gods until one day they draw blood, and the game is up. "The Man Who Would Be King" is an action-packed tale about the pitfalls of colonialism and the temptations and evils of power.

Brought to life by Academy Award®-winning actor F. Murray Abraham and an ensemble cast of narrators, and featuring original music by Michael Bacon, this collection contains Hans Christian Andersen’s most beloved fairy tales, as well as a selection of lesser-known favorites. Unlike the Brothers Grimm, who collected and retold folklore and fairy tales, Hans Christian Andersen adopted the most ancient literary forms and distilled them into a genre that was uniquely his own. His fairy tales are remarkable for their sense of fantasy, power of description, and vivid imagination.

Subtle humour is one of the key elements in Chekhov's imaginative stories. But as an artist, Chekhov is more complicated. He paints life with all its nuances and shades of grey. His stories are full of characters who give us invaluable insight into universal wisdom of everyday life - civilised professionals, enlightened misfits, philanthropic gentry, rich landowners and impoverished royalty holding candles for reason, justice and passion.

“I was sick, sick unto death with that long agony,” begins one of the most famous tales from the master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe. Through the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition, we follow the straying mind of the unnamed prisoner in his quest for hope in a world of darkness and despair. This episode skyrocketed The Classic Tales Podcast to number 3 on iTunes’ Top 100 Podcasts chart.

Hailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, Leo Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his death so much as a passing thought. But one day, death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise he is brought face to face with his own mortality.