English Classic Short Stories

Set 10 years after Little Men, Jo's Boys revisits Plumfield, the New England school still presided over by Jo and her husband, Professor Bhaer. Jo's Boys — including sailor Emil, promising musician Nat, and rebellious Dan — are grown. Jo remains at the center of this tale, holding her boys fast through shipwreck and storm, disappointment...and even murder.

Step into the witty, unsettling, and delightfully ironic world of Saki (H.H. Munro), one of the sharpest voices in Edwardian literature. This classic collection gathers his most memorable and darkly humorous short stories, including The Music on the Hill, The Unrest-Cure, Gabriel-Ernest, and the widely loved The Open Window. Saki's tales are known for their unexpected twists, elegant prose, and subtle satire of British society, often exposing the absurdities behind genteel manners and upper-class conventions.

This collection brings together 17 of Kipling's early stories, written between 1885 and 1888, when Kipling was working as a journalist in India. "The Man Who Would Be King" is the story of two British vagabonds who set off to establish a small kingdom among primitive tribesmen in Afghanistan. Only one of the men returns, and his condition is so bad that the newspaperman-narrator barely recognizes him.

"There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their heads above water.

1. "August Heat" by W. F. Harvey 2. "A Madman’s Manuscript" by Charles Dickens 3. "The Hair" by A. J. Alan 4. "My Favourite Murder" by Ambrose Bierce 5. "Cannibalism in the Cars" by Mark Twain 6. "Gabriel-Earnest" by Saki 7. "The Pistol Shot" by Alexander Pushkin 8. "The Mark of the Beast" by Rudyard Kipling 9. "At the Farmhouse" by E. F. Benson 10. "The Parasite" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 11. "The Murder of the Mandarin" by Arnold Bennett 12. "Moon’s Gibbet" by Egerton Castle 13. "Query" by Seamark

These novelists burst with a literary energy that is hard to contain. They cover a myriad of styles and themes, narratives packed full of fully-formed characters in powerful tales that have become an essential and integral part of our literary heritage.

Leo Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists for such works as War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He also wrote a number of outstanding short stories. This is one of his best.

This follow-up to The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories features familiar Seussian faces and places - including Horton the Elephant, Marco, Mulberry Street, and a Grinch - as well as an introduction by renowned Seuss scholar Charles D. Cohen. Seuss fans will learn more about Horton’s integrity, Marco’s amazing imagination, a narrowly avoided disaster on Mullbery Street, and a devious Grinch.

If you want to understand the daily life and psychology of the late Middle Ages, Ronald Ecker’s classic translation of The Canterbury Tales provides one of the very best means of doing so. Within its audio is to be found a broad range of society - high and low, male and female, rich and poor - who express their innermost beliefs and extravagant fantasies in a series of stories they tell as they make their way to Canterbury Cathedral.

This is Raymond Carver's third collection of stories, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, including the canonical titular story about blindness and learning to enter the very different world of another. The 12 stories in Cathedral mark a turning point in Carver's work.

“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.

Imagine you are hunting an enemy who happens to be your neighbor, and suppose that your neighbor is hunting you. What makes people who should be friends become fierce enemies? Who is the loser in this deadly fight? The answer may shock you.

A volume of selected stories from Washington Irving's The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Praised by Walter Scott and Lord Byron for its prose, this collection consists of his most famous works, "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", as well as the praised short stories "The Broken Heart" and "The Widow and her Son".

The golden age of the short story was in Victorian and Edwardian times, when authors made a living by contributing to literary magazines and journals. These popular journals threw up such literary greats as Dickens, Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard, and Jerome K. Jerome. Many of the great writers are undeservedly neglected by modern audience...but what a pleasure it is to rediscover the literary treasures that delighted our great grandparents!

"J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" is an 1884 short story by young Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the form of a first-person testimony by a survivor of the Marie Celeste, a fictionalized version of the tale of the Mary Celeste, a ship found abandoned and adrift in the Atlantic Ocean in 1872.

A spectacular collection of outstanding half-hour short stories...perfect for commuters or bedtime listening. 'The Whistle' by Hugh Walpole, 'The Well' by W. W. Jacobs, 'The Scrupulous Father' by George Gissing, 'The Debt' by Edith Wharton, 'The Problem of the Five Marks' by Melville Davisson Post, 'The Purple Wig' by G. K. Chesterton, 'Pickman's Model' by H. P. Lovecraft, 'Humplebee' by Geroge Gissing.

Over 50 great classic short stories, each around 20 minutes in length - perfect for short journeys, bedtime listening and those moments in between.... 'The Khitmatgar' by B. M. Croker, 'The Mummy of Thompson Pratt' by Charles John Cutcliffe Hyne, 'The Ghost at the Blue Dragon' by William J. Wintle, 'A Tropical Horror' by William Hope Hodgson, 'Miracles' by Barry Pain, 'The Dust That Was Barren' by P. C. Wren, 'His Unconquerable Enemy' by W. C. Morrow, 'A Tiger’s Skin' by W. W. Jacobs....

"He travels fastest who travels alone...but not after the frost has dropped below zero 50 degrees or more." (Yukon Code) Jack London’s best short story.

A dazzling selection of 30 short stories from the world's best loved storyteller. Get ready for snowball fights and sleigh rides in this collection of 30 classic short stories from Enid Blyton, celebrating the magic and excitement of winter. These fun, entertaining stories are ideal for newly confident listeners and are the perfect length for listening to at bedtime or in the classroom. Enid Blyton remains one of Britain's favourite children's authors, and her bumper short-story collections are perfect for introducing her to the latest generation of listeners.

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.