LitReading - Classic Short Stories and Timeless Tales

Frank Norris could grind a man down to nothing in three hundred naturalist pages. He could also, when the rent was due, write something this loose and this funny. "Two Hearts That Beat as One" sends two soldiers of fortune, one American, one English, gunrunning down the Pacific coast, where they make the oldest mistake there is and fall for the same woman. The cure they settle on is a boxing match. It does not cure them.

Frank Norris was thirty-two when he died, in 1902, which is the kind of fact that stops you cold, because by then he’d already written McTeague and The Octopus, the big grinding novels they still hand out on syllabi. But he wrote lighter things too, and the Three Black Crows were his rowdiest invention, three guns-for-hire who turn up in four different stories getting into trouble on land, at sea, and once or twice somewhere stranger. This was their first time out. It was collected after his death, in a book called A Deal in Wheat, in 1903.

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The note comes on heavy paper from somewhere in Bohemia, unsigned, promising a visitor who will not show his face. He turns out to be very large, very rich, and in a great deal of trouble. Somewhere in a small house in St. John’s Wood there is a photograph. Five attempts to take it have failed.

Holmes has three days, a wardrobe full of other men, and Watson, newly married and glad of the excuse, back at his side for an evening of breaking the law in a good cause.

The first Sherlock Holmes short story, from The Strand Magazine, 1891. Read by Don McDonald.

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As a boy he was teased for his tenderness. He kept birds, rabbits, a dog, a small monkey. And a cat, enormous and entirely black, who followed him from room to room and would have followed him into the street. Now he sits in a cell with a pen, determined to set the record down plainly. He is not mad, he tells us. He is not dreaming. Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 tale.

WARNING: Contains graphic animal and human violence.

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This show is one corner of Short Storyverses, a family of fiction podcasts. Some lean literary. Some are funny. Some will keep you up with the lights on, and some belong by the fire in December. There are classics nobody reads anymore and should, and original stories you won't hear anywhere else. They're all read by Don McDonald from his studio booth, and all short enough to finish on a drive, a walk, or a sleepless night.

Come explore at shortstoryverses.com. Pick a universe. Stay a while.

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Ed Loyce spends his days fixing radios and televisions in a small town where nothing much happens. One evening he climbs out of his basement workroom, walks into the square, and sees something no decent town would put up with.

Then he notices how everyone else is taking it.

Philip K. Dick wrote "The Hanging Stranger" in 1953, a year when plenty of Americans had started keeping an eye on their neighbors. Seventy years on, it still makes you check who's standing behind you.

Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and spent most of his life in California, writing fast, living broke, and asking one question in more than forty novels and over a hundred short stories: what's real? He won the Hugo Award for The Man in the High Castle in 1963, yet for most of his life he was paid like a pulp writer and read like a cult figure. He died in March 1982, a few months before Blade Runner, adapted from his Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, reached theaters. After that the rest of the world caught up. Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and The Man in the High Castle all came from his pages. The paranoia turned out to be prophecy.

If you want more stories like this one, and plenty that are nothing like it, they're all waiting for you at shortstoryverses.com. Go have a look around. Just don't stand under any lampposts on the way there.

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There’s a reason crows gather in cemeteries. They remember. They watch. And sometimes, they wait. Murder of Crows isn’t a tale borrowed from the past—it’s one I wrote for New Tales Told, a series of original stories that echo in the spaces between memory and myth. This one lingers in the cold silence of the American frontier, where the shadows are long and the watchers have wings.

Set in Montana Territory, 1868, Murder of Crows is a western—but not the kind you remember from Saturday matinees. The dead don’t rest. The land doesn’t forget. And the crows? They remember everything.

Author's Note

There’s an old belief that crows remember faces. That they mourn their dead. That they never forget a slight.

It was early morning when a murder of crows descended on the sycamore outside my bedroom window, their cries so sharp and relentless they pulled me from sleep with a strange sense of dread. I lay there, half-conscious and irritated, staring at the ceiling as their screams echoed through the glass. And in that moment—quietly, almost reflexively—I had a thought I wasn’t proud of: Maybe this murder deserves one of its own.

From that flash of anger came something unexpected: a story. Murder of Crows began as a whisper of guilt and folklore. Though it draws faint inspiration from the life and legend of Jeremiah Johnson, this tale is entirely imagined—fiction through and through. But like many stories, its roots are tangled in real emotion: grief, memory, regret… and the uncanny way the natural world sometimes stares back.

As for the birds? They haven’t left.

They’re still watching.

Just outside my window.

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August 20th, 1910. The worst heat in living memory, the kind that flattens a city and slows the blood.

An artist named James Clarence Withencroft spends the morning drawing a man in the dock, caught at the instant sentence is passed on him. Then he walks out into the glare, wanders without direction, and finds himself in a stonemason's yard, where the man from his drawing sits carving a headstone. Neither has ever laid eyes on the other. The name cut into the stone is Withencroft's own, and so is the date.

They agree the safest thing is to sit together until midnight passes.

W.F. Harvey wrote this in 1910, six pages that have refused to loosen their grip in the century since

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Jasper Holt counts other people's money at the Lumber National Bank, and he is very good at it. Out in Rosebank, at the end of a brick path a block long and roofed over with willows, his brother John lives alone, shabby, devout, and nearly invisible. The brothers are not much alike. Sinclair Lewis builds this one patiently, a small arrangement at a time, and then lets the willows lose their leaves.

Sinclair Lewis was born in 1885 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, a small town he spent the rest of his life dissecting. He worked his way through Yale, then through the magazine trade, turning out stories for the Saturday Evening Post and others while he learned how to aim. "The Willow Walk" comes from that stretch, 1918, and was picked up that same year for The Best American Short Stories. The novels followed fast, Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, each one taking a layer off American respectability. In 1930 he became the first American awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in Rome in 1951.

If this one held you, there's a shelf of them waiting at shortstoryverses.com. Litreading is where the classics live, Chekhov, Faulkner, Chopin, Mansfield, read the way they were meant to be heard. New Tales Told carries original fiction you won't find anywhere else. FRIGHTLY handles the dark. HumorUs takes on the funny. Love Lit, Season's Readings, and Readastorus round it out, the last one built for kids and always free of commercials. All of it narrated in one studio by one voice, all of it free. Come find your next story at .

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There are things we expect from the world.

Walls stay still. Rooms hold their shape. The spaces we live in behave.

And when they don’t, we look for explanations.

Old houses settle. Pipes shift. Light plays tricks.

But sometimes the world doesn’t explain itself.

When an answer can’t be seen, that doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

There is something.

Something all too real.

Something beyond frightening.

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There is a special horror in hearing a mind unravel from the inside. In The Diary of a Madman, Guy de Maupassant pulls us into the private writings of a man who can no longer trust his own thoughts. His diary entries begin quietly enough—simple observations, small disturbances—until each page edges closer to something darker, something unmoored, something deeply and intimately wrong.

This is the slow, suffocating terror of a mind turning against itself.

Guy de Maupassant, one of France’s great masters of psychological horror, wrote with an uncanny instinct for the fractures that hide beneath ordinary life. His stories rarely rely on monsters or myth—only on the terrible things people can do, think, or become.

If you enjoyed this tale, explore more shadows and unsettling corners in the Short Storyverses collection at shortstoryverses.com.

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A man insists he is calm… reasonable… even kind. Yet something small and ordinary, something most people would ignore, begins to consume him. It creeps into his thoughts, scrapes against his nerves, and finally drives him toward an act he believes is both necessary and brilliant. But the mind doesn’t stay quiet for long. As the story tightens, the world around him narrows to a single sound he cannot escape. Poe’s tale is a descent told from inside the fall—where the truth comes knocking long before anyone else does.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) reshaped American literature with his mastery of psychological terror, unreliable narrators, and the eerie beauty of the macabre. A poet, critic, and storyteller, Poe created the modern detective story, refined the Gothic genre, and left behind some of the most haunting works in English. His writing slips into the darker corners of the mind—never with cheap shocks, always with precision and a pulse you can feel.

If this tale leaves your heartbeat just a little too loud in your ears, wander deeper into Short Storyverses. From ghosts in the walls to mysteries in the shadows, every story unlocks another room you’re not sure you should enter. But you will. And you’ll want to hear what’s waiting inside.

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There’s a certain kind of ghost story that doesn’t knock at the door or rattle chains. It whispers. It lingers. It asks you to listen a little more closely than you usually do.

Virginia Woolf remains one of the most influential voices in 20th-century literature, and A Haunted House shows why. In just a few pages she turns a simple domestic space into something tender, uncanny, and alive with memory. It’s a ghost story without the usual theatrics—quiet, rhythmic, almost like the house itself is breathing.

If you enjoy these classic tales, you’ll find hundreds more—along with original stories—across the Short Storyverse at shortstoryverses.com. Mysteries, frights, fantasies, holidays, and timeless literature, all waiting for you whenever you’re ready to listen.

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In this unsettling tale, Ambrose Bierce invites us to witness an inquest—one that begins as a routine matter and unravels into something far stranger. A man has died. The evidence is sparse. The testimony is contradictory. And the truth… well, it might be standing right there in the room, unseen.

Prepare for a story that taps on the thin walls of perception and asks whether the most terrifying things are the ones we simply cannot see.

Ambrose Bierce (1842–circa 1914) was an American master of the uncanny—sharp-tongued, mordantly funny, and unafraid to drag readers into the darker corners of the human mind. Known for The Devil’s Dictionary and a lifetime of blistering journalism, Bierce also produced some of the most enduring supernatural tales of the 19th century. The Damned Thing endures because it’s never satisfied with frightening us. It wants to unsettle our certainty about what’s real.

For more journeys into the shadows—classic chills, original nightmares, and the full multiverse of audio storytelling—visit ShortStoryverses.com and discover all the worlds waiting under one roof lit only by a single candle.

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There are stories that whisper warnings, and then there are stories that lean in close and breathe those warnings right into your ear. This is one of the latter. It begins, as these things often do, with an ordinary family in an ordinary home… until a strange relic from a far-off land arrives and tilts the whole world off its axis. It’s a tale about wishes—how badly we want them, and how steep the bill can be when they’re granted.

W. W. Jacobs (1863–1943) was a British writer best known for spinning everyday moments into dark little traps. Though he wrote widely—humor, maritime tales, domestic sketches—it was The Monkey’s Paw that carved his name permanently into the halls of the macabre. The story first appeared in 1902 and has echoed through horror literature ever since, reminding generations that fate has a sharp sense of humor and a very short temper.

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Julius Long’s The Pale Man is a masterclass in quiet dread—an intimate journal of a traveler who becomes aware of a strange newcomer haunting the corridors of his hotel. Nothing overt happens, nothing jumps out, yet the sense of creeping inevitability grows with every page. Its power lies in what we notice… and what we don’t want to.

Julius Long (1907–1955) was an American author best known for short, tightly constructed tales of mystery and the macabre. Though he never became a household name, his work appeared in popular pulp magazines of the era, where readers came to admire his talent for slow-building tension and understated chills. The Pale Man remains his most enduring piece—a quiet legend among fans of subtle horror.

Thank you for listening. This story is part of Short Storyverses, a growing multiverse of storytelling—classic tales, original fiction, children’s adventures, holiday stories, and more. Explore every world at ShortStoryverses.com, and discover your next favorite story.

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Some houses advertise their menace. Others wait. In The Judge’s House, Bram Stoker gives us a quiet old home with a history no one wants to speak aloud. A university student, seeking absolute solitude to study, leases the abandoned residence of a long-dead magistrate known for his severity—and for something darker. At first, it is only the silence that unnerves him. Then comes the persistent scurrying of a single gray rat. Then the eyes. And finally, the feeling that the judgment passed in this house never truly ended.

Bram Stoker (1847–1912) was an Irish writer whose work shaped modern horror. While best known for Dracula, Stoker spent his career constructing atmospheric tales that lingered on fear, superstition, and the unseen forces pressing at the edges of ordinary life. His short fiction often explored the tension between rational men and irrational evil—a conflict that defines The Judge’s House. Stoker’s influence reaches far beyond vampires; he helped establish the psychological and supernatural vocabulary of horror that writers still draw from today.

This story is part of The Short Storyverses, a growing multiverse of storytelling. Explore classic tales on Litreading, original fiction on New Tales Told, playful adventures for young listeners on Readastorus, and warm, timeless holiday stories on Season’s Readings. One place, multiple storyverses, endless stories.

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A Wireless Message is a brief, uncanny tale about a man who receives an impossible warning in the dead of night—one that seems to pass through neither voice nor wire, but something far more mysterious. What begins as a mundane moment on a quiet country road turns suddenly intimate and chilling, as the narrator confronts a message meant only for him, delivered by someone who could not possibly be there. Bierce builds the tension with his trademark simplicity: no theatrics, no tricks, just a quiet encounter that unsettles the rational mind and lingers long after the telling.

Ambrose Bierce (1842–circa 1914) carved out one of the sharpest, most unsettling voices in American literature. A Civil War veteran turned journalist, he carried the battlefield’s brutality into his fiction—distilling it into stories marked by dark wit, psychological unease, and a quiet, relentless tension. His tales often blend the ordinary with the uncanny, questioning the line between reality and nightmare while exposing the fragility of human certainty. Though best known for An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and The Devil’s Dictionary, Bierce’s body of work remains a cornerstone of classic American horror and mystery: lean, atmospheric, and unflinchingly direct.

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In “The Furnished Room,” O. Henry trades his usual light touch for something far more haunting. A weary young man arrives at a shabby New York boarding house, desperately searching for the woman he loves. The room he rents feels strangely steeped in old emotions… and in secrets the landlady would rather not discuss. As he follows faint traces of her presence—a perfume, a song, a whispered memory—the line between the living and the dead begins to blur. This is O. Henry at his darkest: a tale of obsession, despair, and a rented room that holds on to its tragedies long after its tenants have gone.

If you’d like more shivers, shadows, and classic chills, step through the door to Short Storyverses at ShortStoryverses.com. There you’ll find Readastorus for kids, and Season’s Readings for holiday stories with a touch of magic—and sometimes a touch of darkness.

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When a young man survives an event that should have ended his story, he returns changed in ways no doctor—or priest—can explain. Lean, eerie, and unmistakably Bierce, The Man with Two Lives follows a life restored… but not returned intact. What happens when a man comes back carrying more than himself?

Ambrose Bierce (1842–circa 1914) carved his place in American literature with a soldier’s grit and a cynic’s clarity. A Civil War veteran turned journalist and satirist, he wrote with a precision that could cut glass. His supernatural and psychological tales — brief, brutal, unforgettable — helped define American horror. Bierce vanished in Mexico in 1913, leaving behind stories that still unsettle readers more than a century later.

Explore more realms of storytelling — from eerie classics to kid-friendly adventures and the warm glow of Season’s Readings — at ShortStoryverses.com.

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Beneath the streets of old Italy, where carnival laughter drowns out good judgment, Edgar Allan Poe takes us into one of literature’s most unsettling descents. The Cask of Amontillado is a cold, precise story of pride, manipulation, and a man who knows exactly how far he’s willing to go to avenge an unnamed insult. What begins as a simple invitation to taste a rare wine turns into a slow walk into the darkness—brick by brick, step by chilling step. Poe doesn’t rush. He lets the dread spread, flicker, and settle in the reader’s bones. This is one of those tales that reminds us how quietly a human being can plan something monstrous.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) reshaped American literature with his haunting explorations of the human mind. His stories of psychological tension, obsession, and quiet cruelty helped forge the modern mystery and horror genres. In works like The Cask of Amontillado, Poe shows how terror can arise not from the supernatural, but from the precise and calculated darkness people carry within them.

For more timeless classics and new tales inspired by this tradition, visit Short Storyverses, a collection of rich storytelling universes featuring Litreading, Readastorus, and Season's Reading. Discover short fiction that entertains, unsettles, inspires, and transports—all at shortstoryverses.com.

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A beautiful woman married for love, and the love turned to dust. The family lives in style, always a little past its means, and the house has started to whisper. Her small son hears it. He would like very much to be lucky. D. H. Lawrence wrote this for a book of ghost stories in 1926, and it remains one of the most unsettling things he ever put on paper.

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Below Vienna, the Danube floods out into a wilderness of sandbars and willow scrub that the maps mark only as marshes. Two old friends, an Englishman and a Swede, beach their canoe on a small island to wait out a gale. The wind won’t drop. The willows won’t keep still. By morning, one of them has stopped making jokes.

H. P. Lovecraft ranked Algernon Blackwood’s 1907 novella above every other supernatural tale in English.

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Below Vienna, the Danube floods out into a wilderness of sandbars and willow scrub that the maps mark only as marshes. Two old friends, an Englishman and a Swede, beach their canoe on a small island to wait out a gale. The wind won’t drop. The willows won’t keep still. By morning, one of them has stopped making jokes.

Two men paddle through the darkest stretch of the Danube.

H. P. Lovecraft ranked Algernon Blackwood’s 1907 novella above every other supernatural tale in English.

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A blizzard on the river. A ferryman’s empty hut. An old woodcutter and his young apprentice bar the door and wait for morning. Lafcadio Hearn’s retelling of a Japanese legend, from Kwaidan (1904), is a quiet ghost story with a long, cold reach.

From Short Storyverses, where there’s always another story waiting at shortstoryverses.com.

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It starts on a Tuesday in October, at ten minutes to three in the morning. A low tone with no seam in it.

Hollis Pike's neighbors can't hear it. His phone can't record it. The audiologist says his hearing is fine, better than fine, and writes something down.

So he goes looking for where it comes from. The county keeps records. The house has a history. The sound is patient.

An original story, written and read by Don McDonald.

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Four young men from the city, a campfire in the Sullivan County hills, and one small man who can’t stop talking about the black hole in the hillside. He wants a story to take home. His friends want him in front. Stephen Crane was twenty when he wrote this, years before The Red Badge of Courage, and he’s having a wonderful time at his own expense: thunderous prose, a cave dripping with gothic dread, and four bold adventurers who would very much like to be somewhere else.

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John is a physician, and he has a plan for his wife. Rest. Fresh air. No visitors who might excite her. Absolutely no writing.

He's rented a colonial mansion for the summer and given her the big room at the top, the old nursery, with barred windows and a bed that won't move. She keeps a journal anyway, tucked out of sight whenever he comes up the stairs. In it she writes about the house, the garden, the baby, her husband's kindness.

Mostly she writes about the wallpaper.

Published in 1892 and still unsettling. Read by Don McDonald

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He has four words. He's had them for forty-two years. He's said them in the car, he's said them in the shower with the water running, and he still can't get the stress to fall where it belongs.

Now the seatbelt sign is on, the descent has started, and his brother is running out of days. In his jacket pocket is a voicemail he has never played.

There's a rule pilots follow below ten thousand feet. Nothing gets said that doesn't need saying. He always thought that sounded like a good way to live.

An original story, written and read by Don McDonald.

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Mark Twain falls into conversation with a pleasant gentleman who has mild opinions on weather, crops, literature, scandal and religion. Then the talk lands on burglar alarms, and the gentleman is suddenly not mild at all. His was the most imposing alarm in America. It had a gong the size of a washbowl, forty-seven little tags, and an expert from New York who always came when called, and always remembered to send a bill. Twain, who had an alarm put into his own Hartford house the year before he wrote this, lets the man talk.

First published in Harper’s Christmas supplement, December 1882.

This is a recently remastered story from our archive.

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Dr. Nathan Cole measures water for a living. It's quiet work, gauges and spreadsheets, the slow arithmetic of things that don't change much. Then a reservoir gains four inches overnight with no rain, no inflow, no explanation, and gives them back by morning. Everyone blames the sensor. The sensor is fine. What follows is the worst thing a careful man can discover, which is that he's been measuring the right thing all along.

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Wall Street, a spring morning at the turn of the century. The ticker is running hot, the telephone won’t quit, and Harvey Maxwell, broker, is handling it all like a man with springs where his heart should be. His clerk thinks the boss is slipping. His stenographer has something on her mind. Then a window opens, and somebody on the Exchange starts clubbing the stuffing out of Union Pacific.

O. Henry at full gallop, in a nine-minute comedy from The Four Million, read by Don McDonald.

This is a story from the archives recently remastered.

Litreading is part of the Short Storyverses network of fiction podcasts. More stories, more feeds, at shortstoryverses.com.

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There is a job nobody warns you about. After the dying comes the paperwork, the hold music, the strangers in call centers who need proof that she is gone.

For two years she was her mother’s caregiver. Now she is her mother’s administrator. She makes lists. She keeps folders. She is very good at this.

Then she reaches the bottom of the last statement.

An original story, written and read by Don McDonald.

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Every house party has a guest who knows too much.

A mild little man named Cornelius Appin has spent seventeen years on one problem. He believes he's solved it: he has taught a cat to speak. The company around Lady Blemley's tea table does not believe him — and that, as it happens, is the last comfortable moment anyone in the house will enjoy.

Pour yourself some tea. Mind the saucer.

Saki was the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916), the sharpest wit of the Edwardian age. Born in Burma and raised in Devon by a grandmother and two aunts he could not abide, he became a foreign correspondent before turning his pen on polite society. He borrowed his pen name from the cupbearer in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. When war came in 1914, he enlisted as a private at forty-three and refused a commission; he was killed by a sniper in France on November 14, 1916. His last words were “Put that bloody cigarette out.”

“Tobermory” first appeared in the Westminster Gazette in 1909 and was collected in The Chronicles of Clovis in 1911.

Read by Don McDonald. LitReading is part of the Short Storyverses network. shortstoryverses.com

This is a story from the archives recently remastered.

We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks.

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Winter, 1906. A clerk who speaks to no one from Saturday to Monday buys a mahogany graphophone for far less than it’s worth. The widow selling it keeps her eyes on the snow. Her husband, she says, liked to keep his own voice.

He carries it home and records his diary each night, and the machine hands him back to himself, the nearest thing to company he has. Then the wax starts holding something he never put there.

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A farmer lies dead in his bed with a rope around his neck. That morning his wife sat in the kitchen, pleating her apron, and said she slept through it.

So the men come out to the farmhouse: the sheriff, the county attorney, and the neighbor who found her. They search the cold rooms for something that will hold up in court. Two of their wives ride along to gather a few things for the woman in the county jail. Nobody expects much from them.

The kitchen is a mess of unfinished chores and small things left where they fell.

Susan Glaspell once covered a murder case like this as a young reporter in Iowa, and it stayed with her. She wrote the story in 1917, and a century later it still hasn't loosened its grip.

This is a story from the archives recently remastered.

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Nobody in New Orleans had ever made Bernard de Marigny look foolish in public. He was rich past counting, small as a foil, and very likely the most dangerous man in Louisiana with a pistol in his hand. Then a blacksmith from a far parish, seven feet of him and slow to speak, said something true on the floor of the legislature, and the whole chamber laughed.

The card came to the forge two days later.

The blacksmith was no duelist. He was, however, a man who had spent his life learning where something hard gives.

From Short Storyverses. More at shortstoryverses.com.

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A man in a country pub insists his story is true. It concerns his brother Wilfred, a chemist of some genius, a jolly outdoor girl with a wholesome sunburn, and a Yorkshire baronet who spells his name with four small f's. Somebody is being kept behind a locked door on the second floor. Somebody else is about to regret asking what's true to life.

This is P.G. Wodehouse, 1926, at his most gleefully unreliable.

First published in Liberty, August 7, 1926; collected in Meet Mr. Mulliner, 1927. Read by Don McDonald. HumorUs is part of the Short Storyverses network. shortstoryverses.com

This is a story from the archives recently remastered.

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An obituary arrives in the mail, folded in thirds, no note, no return address, and the creases are sharp enough to cut with.

Roy Kittleson has not seen the man named in it since a Friday in 1986, and he has his reasons, and none of them are good. He drives up anyway. Three hours, most of it flat.

He has rehearsed nothing. He is counting on grief to arrive on its own.

“The Wrong Funeral,” is an original story written and read by Don McDonald from ShortStoryverses.com.

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Here is the first episode of a new Short Storyverses limited series podcast, Care Protocol.

Nobody has died on a Portland street in four years. The city handed over the wheel eight years ago and got back quiet nights, clean air, and a fatality rate of zero. Ask anyone. The algorithms saved us.

Then, at 7:12 on an ordinary Tuesday, a man waiting for his morning ride is killed against a brick wall at Fifth and Glisan—in front of three witnesses who all describe the same impossible thing. Before lunch, there is a second.

The company’s lawyers called the police seven minutes after the first death. That was six minutes before anyone called them.

Special Agent Maya Restrepo catches the case: deaths that could not have happened, and a maintenance log with a sentence sitting in it where a number should be.

You’re hearing Episode One of Care Protocol as a special LitReading bonus. The story continues on its own separate podcast, and future episodes will not appear in the LitReading feed. Search for and follow Care Protocol wherever you get your podcasts.

In Episode Two of Care Protocol:

Something happens on a stretch of I-5 outside Wilsonville, caught from nine angles. By Friday morning, there isn’t a screen in the country that hasn’t run it. By Saturday, the country has decided what it means—and Maya Restrepo is the only person still asking the other question.

Episode Two arrives Wednesday, September 16, exclusively in the Care Protocol podcast feed.

Explore our multiverse of narrated short stories at ShortStoryVerses.com.

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The Garden was finished before anyone in it was born. The rain arrives on schedule, in the amount that has been decided. The manual has never been improved on.

Nobody touches anybody. Children learn it early, with the short rod, because correcting is cheapest when they're small.

Sela is twenty-two and has never had a low year. When the tremor takes the hands of the old man who grades pears beside her, she stands up and says, "I'll take that." Nothing forbids it. There is even a provision.

Two hundred and nine times. Over twenty months.

Somebody is keeping the number.

“The Garden’s Wall” started with a question I couldn’t put down. What would a society look like if it decided, sincerely and on the evidence, that compassion was a defect to be bred out? Not a cruel place. A reasonable one, where the punishment is measured, the reasoning is sound, and nobody enjoys any part of it.

The answer turned out to be a garden, and a wall nobody built, and a gate that opens outward, and forty-one people put through it in a single lifetime.

Please check out my many universes of short stories at shortstoryverses.com and my long-running money podcast, Talking Real Money.

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A December afternoon, a fire going down, and a marriage stalled halfway through a quarrel nobody bothered to finish. Egbert comes in for tea prepared to be reasonable, then conciliatory, then almost penitent. Lady Anne, rigid in the armchair by the tea table, declines to participate. Somewhere above them a bullfinch works through the only tune it knows, and on the rug a Persian cat named Don Tarquinio waits with the patience of an animal who has already decided something.

Saki at his most precise: eleven minutes of drawing-room comedy built entirely out of one person not speaking, and a closing line that reorganizes everything you just heard.

"The Reticence of Lady Anne" was collected in Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches (1910). Read by Don McDonald.

Litreading is part of Short Storyverses. shortstoryverses.com

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Poker Flat is a mining camp that has recently decided to take its virtue seriously. When the town's new moral committee finishes its business, four of its most familiar faces find themselves traveling a mountain trail with strangers who know far too much about one another's pasts. Among them is a gambler whose quiet confidence suggests he has already calculated every card that has not yet been dealt.

Bret Harte's classic American story unfolds where the Sierra Nevada meets the law of unexpected consequences. In the company of strangers, with old judgments left behind in the valley below, the outcasts of Poker Flat discover that the line between sinner and saint is rarely where the town's respectable citizens believe it to be. A timeless tale about the hands we are dealt, the hands we play, and the surprising hands we never see coming.

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This is not a story.

After dozens of episodes, I thought I'd take one to explain myself. Who I am, why LitReading exists, how a story earns a place here, and why there are suddenly so many related shows sharing the same shelf. Also a few honest words about advertising, a tip jar I'd rather call Buy Me a Book, a request for a review, and a listener who found my narration unlistenable.

Don's Money podcast is Talking Real Money

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Arnold Thorndike buys a Correggio before breakfast and can price his own time to the minute. Two hundred dollars of it. So when he stops his car at the Court of General Sessions to say a word for a young stenographer who got drunk, lost five hundred dollars of his employer's money, and is due up for sentence, he figures the errand will run him about a thousand.

The court has other ideas. Richard Harding Davis, the most famous reporter of his generation, sets the Wisest Man in Wall Street down on a hard oak chair and leaves him there, unrecognized and unimportant, admitted only because he's "with Mr. Andrews," while the whole sorry parade of the city files past the bench.

This is a comedy of manners with a soft heart.

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High summer, and it is too hot to sing. A huntsman walks a road with a gun on his shoulder, a bird in his bag, and a dog running ahead of him. A woman steps out of the rye with a sickle in her hand and says his name. She is delighted to see him. He is not.

They sit down between two fir trees, and in the ten minutes that follow, Anton Chekhov does something very quiet and very cruel. He was twenty-five, writing fast and for money under a pen name, and he claimed later that he wrote this one in a bathhouse in a single sitting

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This story is the first story specifically written for HumorUs Stories, a funny story podcast from ShortStoryverses.com.

In Maple Glen, nothing ever happens. This week, nothing happens in three separate backyards, after dark, and everyone involved would prefer you didn't ask.

A deadpan comedy about honesty, neighbors, and one very patient dog.

Find more stories at ShortStoryverses.com — a multiverse of audio fiction spanning seven shows: classics on LitReading, original voices on New Tales Told, children's stories on Readastorus, holiday tales on Season's Readings, horror on FRIGHTLY!, romance on Love Lit, and comedy on HumorUs. Every story sized to fit a commute, a walk, or the quiet stretch before sleep. We have stories buried everywhere.

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Nora has come up to Lake Sabbath to do one hard, practical thing — close the old family house for good, and mark what will be sold. She means to stay a single night. But a house keeps its own memory: the key still on its nail, the drawer that sticks, a boat with a name. And a long, unhurried summer evening on still water can ask more of a person than they came prepared to answer.

Short Storyverses is our multiverse of audio fiction — where each show spins in its own orbit but shares one sky. Classics and originals on LitReading, suspense on FRIGHTLY!, romance on Love Lit, comedy on HumorUs, new voices on New Tales Told, and tales for the youngest listeners too. Short enough for a commute, a walk, or the quiet before sleep. Press play at shortstoryverses.com.

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Atop Orange Mountain, in Mr. Jacobus's summer boarding house, a bored married couple finds relief from their tiresome fellow guests in the arrival of the Bredes — a graceful, good-looking young pair who seem, in every visible way, to be "nice people." But their charming small talk keeps springing leaks.

Henry Cuyler Bunner (1855–1896) was a poet, novelist, and the longtime editor of the humor magazine *Puck*, celebrated for polished short stories that find real feeling inside social comedy. "The Nice People" is one of his warmest — a story about gossip, appearances, and the whole hidden other side of people that we never see from the heights of our own self-esteem. 

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The critics call Jerome Wilmer a wizard. They say he doesn't paint faces — he paints hopes, fears, and longings, and that no secret survives sitting for one of his portraits. Home from Paris for his annual New England summer, Wilmer has spent ten years asking Mary Brinsley the same question and getting the same gentle answer. This year, he sets up a canvas in the barn and asks her fiancé to sit instead. Alice Brown's "The Wizard's Touch" (1906) is a quiet story about love, rivalry, and what a portrait really shows — the person you are, or the person you might become. Carefully selected and beautifully narrated by Don McDonald, LitReading brings classic literature back to life — read out loud the way it was meant to be heard. New stories every week.

About the author: Alice Brown (1857–1948) was born on a farm in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, and became one of New England's most admired writers of her era. After moving to Boston in 1884, she produced nearly a book a year for five decades — novels, plays, poetry, and the "local color" stories of New England village life that made her reputation, including the collections Meadow-Grass (1896) and The Country Road (1906). "The Wizard's Touch" was published in 1906, at the height of her career.

Enjoyed today's story? Follow or subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode, and if you have a moment, a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify helps other listeners discover the show. Explore our complete catalog of classic short stories and original tales at shortstoryverses.com. LitReading is written, produced, and narrated by Don McDonald. "The Wizard's Touch" by Alice Brown is in the public domain.

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Here is a special bonus episode for your summer listening pleasure.

A sweltering summer afternoon on the Louisiana coast, a storm racing in off the Gulf, and a woman alone in her house when an old flame rides up the path for shelter. Kate Chopin wrote "The Storm" in 1898 and then did something telling with it, she put it in a drawer, because she knew no editor of her day would print a story that rendered a woman's desire so frankly and then refused to punish anyone for it. It stayed unseen until 1969, more than sixty years after her death. Today it stands as one of the boldest short stories in American literature, a small, perfect thing about passion, nature, and the space between what we owe and what we want.

Kate Chopin (1850–1904) was born in St. Louis and married into Louisiana Creole society, and after her husband's death she turned to writing, drawing on the Cajun and Creole world she had lived among. Her 1899 novel, "The Awakening," was so unflinching about a woman's inner and sexual life that the backlash all but ended her career in her lifetime. Vindication came slowly and completely, and she is now regarded as a foundational voice in American fiction and an early, fearless chronicler of women's desire and independence.

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A perfect summer morning, a lawn being readied for the most delightful garden party of the season, and a death just down the hill that no one quite knows what to do with. Katherine Mansfield’s 1922 masterpiece follows young Laura Sheridan as the giddy pleasures of her family’s wealth, a hat, a band, trays of lilies, run headlong into the reality of a working man killed in the lane below. Tender, ironic, and quietly devastating, “The Garden Party” is one of the great short stories of the twentieth century, and it ends on a sentence Laura cannot finish.

“The Garden Party” was written by Katherine Mansfield and first published in 1922. If this reading stayed with you, please share Litreading with a fellow lover of fine stories and leave a five-star rating or review, it’s the simplest way to help the work reach new listeners. Discover our multiverse of short stories at shortstoryverses.com. Thanks for listening.

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Another perfect Summer Story from Litreading.

A sailor given up for drowned walks back through his own shop door, three years gone, with a fresh scar and a long story about shipwreck, islands, and rescue. His wife weeps with joy. His mother-in-law only sniffs. And across town an old fortune-teller waits with a little china bowl and a great deal to say about where the man has really been. "The Castaway" is W.W. Jacobs at his lightest, a small seaside comedy of belief, suspicion, and a homecoming that goes nowhere near the way anyone planned. The truth here is a slippery thing, and the teller may not be the one you expect.

W.W. Jacobs (1863 to 1943) was an English writer best known today for the horror classic "The Monkey's Paw," though in his own time he was celebrated mostly for comic stories, many of them set among sailors, dock workers, and the small coastal towns they came home to. "The Castaway" shows that lighter, sharper side, the wit that made him a popular favorite long before a single cursed wish made him famous.

Litreading is part of Short Storyverses, a network of fiction podcasts gathering the strange, the funny, and the quietly unsettling, all of it read aloud. Find every show and every story at shortstoryverses.com.

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Welcome to our first special summer story of 2026.

A May storm rolls over a Russian village, and a small beggar-girl runs through it looking for Terenty the cobbler. Her brother has jammed his hand in a hollow tree, reaching after a cuckoo's egg. What begins as a rescue becomes a long, wandering walk through fields washed clean by rain, a barefoot old man naming every living thing for a boy who cannot hear enough of it.

There's no real plot here, and that's the point. Chekhov gives us weather, wonder, and the quiet ache of a child who has no home to walk back to. The last image, offered to no one but the moon, may stay with you longer than the storm.

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) was a Russian short-story writer and playwright, and a working doctor besides. He wrote hundreds of stories that changed what the form could do, trading tidy plots and clear morals for mood, restraint, and the quiet weight of ordinary life. "Medicine is my lawful wife," he once said, "and literature is my mistress." He died of tuberculosis at forty-four, having reshaped both the short story and the modern stage.

If you enjoyed this story, check out all of our short story podcasts on the Short Storyvesrse channel on Apple Podcasts or at shortstoryverses.com

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A woman alone in a decaying house. A town that watches her for fifty years, pitying, judging, whispering, and never once truly seeing her. And one room upstairs that no one has opened in forty years.

Faulkner published it in 1930 and it just entered the public domain. This is a story that loses none of its grip on the second telling, or the tenth. 

And you may have caught it: there's no rose anywhere in the story. Faulkner said the title was a salute, a flower handed to a woman whose tragedy could never be undone. The town watched her for fifty years and gave her nothing. The rose is Faulkner's, laid down after she's gone, the way roses usually are.

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An original story, written and read by me, Don McDonald.

This one began with something I read and couldn't shake. The universe is expanding, and it won't stop, and the stars are spending the only fuel there is. The brightest burn out first. The small, dim, patient ones hold on the longest, for trillions of years, until at last the final star flickers out and the dark that follows has no end and no dawn.

I found I couldn't stop thinking about that last light, and about who might be there to watch it die. Less the physics of the thing than the ache underneath it, one witness at the end of everything, keeping a watch that has finally run out of anything to keep.

That became Dark.

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On a bright Sunday afternoon in a French public garden, a lonely English teacher lifts her treasured fox fur from its box, settles onto her usual bench, and quietly borrows the lives going on around her. Katherine Mansfield's "Miss Brill," first published in 1920, is a small marvel, barely two thousand words that somehow hold an entire life up to the light. The band plays, the season has begun, the crowd parades, and Miss Brill, watching, decides she too has a part in the great Sunday performance. It is warm and observant and quietly shattering, modernist storytelling at its most humane, and it ends on a single image you won't soon shake. Read by Don McDonald.

Katherine Mansfield was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1888, and spent most of her short adult life in England and on the Continent, restless, often ill, and always writing. She is remembered now as one of the great modernists of the short story, a writer who could fit an entire life inside a few pages and turn it slowly in the light. Virginia Woolf, not a generous judge of her contemporaries, once confessed that Mansfield's was the only writing she had ever been jealous of. Mansfield died in France in 1923, of tuberculosis, just thirty-four years old, with most of her finest work behind her and, you can't help feeling, a great deal more still ahead.

Litreading is part of Short Storyverses (shortstoryverses.com), a multiverse of audio fiction devoted to exceptional storytelling, classics and originals alike. Explore Readastorus for timeless tales for the youngest listeners, Season's Readings to brighten your holidays any time of year, Love Lit for the romantics and the hopelessly devoted, and FRIGHTLY! for tales that keep the lights low and the floorboards creaking. Search for all of them wherever you get your podcasts.

If you enjoy historical fiction, be sure to check out Don's first novel, The Line Uncrossed available at Amazon.com.

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In August 1864, thirty thousand Union prisoners were dying behind a wall of felled pine in southern Georgia. The man in command was a Swiss-born captain with a ruined arm, a sick wife back home, and a daughter whose portrait he kept on his writing table. His name was Henry Wirz, and a year later he would be the only man executed for war crimes after the Civil War.

"Man or Monster" follows him through a single day. The morning report. The short rations. The chain. The deadline. The letters to a Richmond that never wrote back. No verdict, no villain's speech, just one man doing his duty inside a horror he could name but could not stop, and the question the title leaves with you.

From the world of Don McDonald's novel The Line Uncrossed. The book is available at Amazon.com, BN.com, and others booksellers or you can get a special ebook bundle that includes this and two other Civil War stories at donmcdonald.com

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Ambrose Bierce fought as a Union officer at the battle of Chickamauga in September of 1863. Twenty-six years later, he wrote this story about it.

A warning before you press play. "Chickamauga" is brief and graphic. Bierce describes wounded and dying men in unflinching detail, and there is a small child at the center of the story. If you've served, if you've lost someone to war, or if you're listening with children present, take a moment before you begin.

This is not the Civil War of monuments and ceremony. It is the war as Bierce saw it, written by a man who refused to let his country forget.

A note on the language: Bierce wrote for readers of 1889, and his vocabulary, sentence length, and classical allusions reflect that. He expected his audience to do some work. The difficulty is part of the experience.

The battle in the title was a real battle. More than 34,000 men were killed, wounded, or captured over three days in north Georgia. One of them, captured on September 20th, 1863, was John B. Anderson of the 6th Indiana Volunteer Infantry — my great-great-grandfather. He survived Libby Prison, Danville, and Andersonville, and walked home on the last day of 1864.

His story inspired The Line Uncrossed, a novel following a young soldier named Levi Anderson from enlistment through capture, captivity, and homecoming. It's available May 22nd, 2026, wherever books are sold.

You can also immediately purchase a special ebook package with The Line Uncrossed and a three story bonus ebook with this story and two original stories from the world of The Line Uncrossed for only $5 at donmcdonald.com

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Henry Pollard has always had a dangerous relationship with words.

In 1861 Indianapolis, while the country rushes headlong toward war, Henry would prefer to remain where he is: alive, sarcastic, and safely distant from glory. But a simple errand on behalf of a worried mother places him at a recruiting table outside the statehouse, where one ordinary moment begins quietly rearranging the rest of his life.

The Pen is an original short story set in the world of The Line Uncrossed, a literary Civil War novel about family, memory, survival, and the irreversible weight of seemingly small decisions. Told with wit, warmth, and the hindsight of years, it offers a deeply human glimpse into the young men who marched toward war before they understood what war truly was.

The Line Uncrossed, available May 22, 2026 at Amazon.com, BN.com, and a host of other book and e-book services.

Podcast listeners can get an early access to The Line Uncrossed e-book offer with bonus stories, including this one, atdonmcdonald.com

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A man is offered five gifts by a fairy, and told that only one of them holds any real value. He is asked to choose. What follows is one of Mark Twain's bleakest parables, written in the shadow of personal loss, and rendered with the dark precision of a writer who had stopped pretending that wisdom arrives in time to be useful.

The Five Boons of Life was published in 1902, when Mark Twain was sixty-six years old, and it belongs to a period of his work that bears little resemblance to the river-bright comedy of Tom Sawyer or the rolling satire of Huckleberry Finn. By the time he wrote this fable, the man born Samuel Clemens had buried his beloved daughter Susy, who died of meningitis in 1896 while he was abroad, unable to reach her. His wife Olivia, the center of his emotional life for more than three decades, was in failing health and would die two years after this story was written. His youngest daughter Jean, who suffered from epilepsy, would drown in a bathtub on Christmas Eve of 1909, four months before Twain himself died. He outlived nearly everyone he had built his life around.

He had also outlived his own fortune. A series of disastrous investments, most notoriously in the Paige typesetting machine, had bankrupted him in the 1890s and forced him to undertake a global lecture tour, in his sixties, to pay back creditors he was not legally obligated to repay. He did it anyway, because his name was on the debt, and his name had once meant something to him.

By 1902, fame had become, in his own assessment, a kind of haunting. Pleasure had thinned. Love had cost him more than he believed any human heart should be asked to pay. And wealth, he had learned twice over, was a borrowed thing that the world reclaimed without warning. What remained was the suspicion, hardened by experience into something like conviction, that the only mercy available to a human being was the one nobody wanted to ask for, and that even that mercy was distributed without justice.

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In April, 2026, an American F-15E Strike Eagle went down over western Iran. The weapons officer ejected into the Zagros Mountains and was eventually recovered, in an operation whose full scope remains classified, but which is understood to have involved the destruction of hundreds of millions of dollars in American aircraft on the ground rather than risk leaving them, or him, behind.

The Crevice is a work of fiction built on the bones of that event. The names are invented. The mountain is invented. The man wedged into the rock is invented. But the cost was real. The promise that brought the helicopters in was real. And the men who flew through the dark to keep that promise, the special operators and aircrews who do this work in places most of us will never know about, for people whose names they will never learn, they are real, and they are the reason the story ends the way it does.

This story is being presented on Litreading for limited time to help build the audience for its eventual primary home, New Tales Told part of Short Storyverses. New Tales Told is made up of totally original modern stories written with the feel of classic short stories (suitable for all ages). There are now fourteen original stories so please check start listening and subscribing to New Tales Told. On Apple Podcasts it is part of the Short Storyverses Channel.

We are expanding our universe of short story podcasts on our new podcast channel, Short StoryVerses. Listen to some of Don's new, original short stories on the "New Tales Told" podcast. Look it up on your favorite podcast player.

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Lady Carlotta misses her train, and a stranger on the platform mistakes her for the new governess. Rather than correct the error, Lady Carlotta decides to accept the position — and teach history by a method the Quabarl household will not soon forget. From the inimitable Saki, a story of social comeuppance served with perfect composure.

Saki was the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro, born in Burma in 1870 and raised in England by two strict aunts whose tyrannies would later populate his fiction. He worked as a journalist and foreign correspondent before turning to the short story, where his wit, elegance, and appetite for mischief found their natural home. He enlisted at the outbreak of the First World War and was killed by a sniper in France in 1916.

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During the Civil War, the military's telegraph network was run by civilians. Teenagers, some of them. Elias Murrow was nineteen, careful, and precise. He trusted the procedure because the procedure had never failed him. Then two messages arrived that couldn't both be real, and he did exactly what he was trained to do.

This story is being presented on Litreading for limited time to help build the audience for its eventual primary home, New Tales Told part of Short Storyverses. New Tales Told is made up of totally original modern stories written with the feel of classic short stories (suitable for all ages). There are now fourteen original stories so please check start listening and subscribing to New Tales Told. On Apple Podcasts it is part of the Short Storyverses Channel.

We are expanding our universe of short story podcasts on our new podcast channel, Short StoryVerses. Listen to some of Don's new, original short stories on the "New Tales Told" podcast. Look it up on your favorite podcast player.

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A chance reunion at a Paris café. A photograph of a woman who looks like she's hiding something. And a story that asks a question Wilde never quite answers: What's worse, a woman with a secret, or a woman who simply loves the appearance of having one? Oscar Wilde's "The Sphinx Without a Secret," published in 1887, is a small, perfect jewel of a story about mystery, obsession, and the danger of needing people to be more complicated than they are.

Oscar Wilde wrote "The Sphinx Without a Secret" in 1887, when he was thirty-three and already the most quotable man in England. He's remembered for the big things, "The Picture of Dorian Gray," "The Importance of Being Earnest," the trials that destroyed him. But pieces like this one remind you that he could do more with a photograph and a cup of coffee than most writers can do with a hundred pages.

f you enjoyed this story, there's a lot more where it came from. At ShortStoryverses.com you'll find all of our podcasts: New Tales Told for original fiction, Season's Readings for holiday stories, Readastorus for the whole family, and FRIGHTLY for when you want to lose a little sleep. And if you've got a second, tap that five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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The Committee Committee is a parable set in a village where things run smoothly—because they always have.

Problems are addressed. Responsibilities are shared. And when questions arise, there is a structure in place to handle them.

Over time, that structure has grown more refined, more comprehensive… and more complete.

This story is being presented on Litreading for limited time to help build the audience for its eventual primary home, New Tales Told part of Short Storyverses. New Tales Told is made up of totally original modern stories written with the feel of classic short stories (suitable for all ages). There are now fourteen original stories so please check start listening and subscribing to New Tales Told. On Apple Podcasts it is part of the Short Storyverses Channel.

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First published in 1870, “My Watch” is one of Mark Twain’s sharpest short comic essays. What begins as a simple adjustment to a timepiece becomes an escalating satire of overconfidence, technical jargon, and the human tendency to meddle with what already works. In fewer than ten minutes, Twain turns a minor inconvenience into a masterclass in comic exaggeration.

Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born in 1835. A riverboat pilot, journalist, lecturer, and one of America’s most enduring humorists, Twain built his reputation on sharp observation, comic exaggeration, and a deep skepticism of human certainty. His works include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but he was equally at home in short essays like this one — small mechanical failures turned into very large human truths.

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Every crime begins as a solution. At least to someone. This is a story about a solution. A rented room. A promise. And a man who believes he is doing what’s necessary.

This story is being presented on Litreading for limited time to help build the audience for its eventual primary home, New Tales Told part of Short Storyverses. New Tales Told is made up of totally original modern stories written with the feel of classic short stories (suitable for all ages). There are now fourteen original stories so please check start listening and subscribing to New Tales Told. On Apple Podcasts it is part of the Short Storyverses Channel.

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Published in 1921, The Doll’s House is one of Katherine Mansfield’s most quietly powerful stories. Set in a small New Zealand community, it explores class, exclusion, and childhood cruelty through something deceptively simple: the arrival of an elaborate doll’s house.

Mansfield does not moralize. Instead, she observes. Through small gestures and overheard whispers, she reveals how social hierarchies are absorbed and enforced — even by children.

At its center is a tiny amber lamp. And a moment of grace.

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This story is not about the America we live in.

It’s about an America that could exist—slowly, legally, and quietly—if people stop asking questions.

Civic Duty follows a retired teacher whose life is reduced to data points, compliance scores, and administrative decisions.

A speculative warning about what happens when systems replace judgment and loyalty becomes measurable.

This story is being presented on Litreading for limited time to help build the audience for its eventual primary home, New Tales Told part of Short Storyverses. New Tales Told is made up of totally original modern stories written with the feel of classic short stories (suitable for all ages). There are now more than a dozen original stories so please check them out.

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Set in the frozen Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush, it follows a man traveling alone through temperatures so extreme they defy ordinary experience. Confident in his judgment and dismissive of risk, he presses forward—unaware of how narrow his margin for error truly is.

With stark realism and relentless tension, London explores humanity’s limits in the face of nature’s indifference. This is not a story of heroic triumph. It is a story of judgment, instinct, and the consequences of small mistakes in unforgiving conditions.

First published in 1908, To Build a Fire remains a timeless classic of American literature.

If you enjoy great stories narrated by Don, be sure to check out his other short story podcasts at shortstoryverses.com

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Here is a quiet story about love that arrives too late, and lingers in unexpected ways.

About two people who find each other where they never expected to meet.

And what it means to hold on, even when you know you can’t.

Please check out our other short story universes are shortstoryverses.com

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The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant is a classic tale of ambition, illusion, and unintended consequences.

In this short, elegant story, a young woman’s desire for wealth and status leads her down a path she never expected.

A quiet masterpiece with a devastating final twist.

Guy de Maupassant was a nineteenth-century French writer and one of the masters of the modern short story.

He wrote hundreds of stories, known for their clarity, irony, and emotional precision.

His work often explored class, ambition, and the hidden costs of desire.

The Necklace, published in 1884, remains one of his most famous and enduring stories.

If you want more stories like this, go to shortstoryverses.com.

You’ll find a whole story universe there: classic literature brought to life, original fiction, stories for younger listeners, and themed collections for whatever mood you’re in.

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This is a special presentation of my original short story, “The Right Call,” first released on my companion podcast, New Tales Told.

For now, I’ll be sharing my new stories here on Litreading as well—so you can hear them easily, without having to go looking.

Litreadingwill always remain a home for classic short fiction. These are simply new stories, told in the same spirit.

The Right Call is a work of fiction, loosely inspired by a real turning point in my own life.

The events, characters, station, and circumstances have been changed. What remains is the emotional truth of a moment many people recognize: standing at a crossroads between what looks sensible and what feels right.

This story isn’t about radio.

It’s about listening—to others, and to yourself—when the script stops working.

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The Bet is a devastating meditation on freedom, knowledge, money, and the illusions we cling to when we mistake intellect for wisdom and wealth for meaning. Sparse, icy, and quietly explosive, this story leaves no one untouched—not the characters, and not the listener.

Anton Chekhov was a Russian physician, playwright, and master of the modern short story. Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, Chekhov rejected melodrama in favor of moral ambiguity, emotional restraint, and brutal psychological honesty.

His stories rarely offer heroes or villains—only people, trapped by their own beliefs, habits, and blind spots. With surgical precision and profound compassion, Chekhov reshaped fiction, influencing generations of writers who followed.

He believed that a writer’s job was not to provide answers—but to ask questions so clearly that the reader could not escape them.

The Bet is one of his sharpest.

You're invited to explore our many short story podcasts at shortstoryverses.com

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This is a special presentation of my new original short story, "The Eternal Code," first released on my companion podcast, New Tales Told. Until the new podcast finds its audience, I will continue to post my original stories at Litreading, too.

Litreading will continue to feature classic short fiction, just as always.

For listeners who enjoy original, contemporary stories, New Tales Told is where I share new work—standalone fiction meant to be experienced in audio. Just search for it on this podcast service or visit shortstoryverses.com

No one remembers the first human thought. But it remembers us.

We tell ourselves that memory lives in bones, in blood, in history books and hard drives. But memory is older than all of that. Memory is the original technology. And once it learned how to survive us, it never stopped evolving.

The Eternal Code is a story about inheritance that has nothing to do with money and everything to do with continuity. About the quiet arrogance of believing we are the end of the line. About a signal so deeply embedded in humanity that we mistake it for destiny.

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Every story you've ever loved learned it from somewhere. The plot twist, the heartbreak, the monster in the dark—somebody wrote it first. Narrator Don McDonald brings classic literature back to life, read out loud the way it was meant to be heard. Dickens. Poe. Twain. Wharton. Doyle. Names you know. Stories you think you know—until you actually hear them. Some built entire genres. Some broke every rule. Some are just flat-out better than they have any right to be after a hundred years. No class. No test. Just your ears and a little time. Because the classics aren't homework. They're the stories that refused to die.

Litreading is part of the "Short Storyverses" podcast network. If you love stories, check out our other shows: Season's Readings for holiday tales, New Tales Told for original fiction, Readastorus for stories the whole family can enjoy, and FRIGHTLY for when you want to lose a little sleep. Find them all at shortstoryverses.com.

If you're enjoying Litreading, take a second to tap that five-star rating on Apple Podcasts (or "Rate the Show" five-stars on Spotify). It helps other listeners find the show—and keeps me from taking that two-star rating too personally. Thanks.

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Without individual compassion, the good, old days were rarely good for orphaned or disabled children.

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Early in the US Civil War, families, particularly those in the western part of Virginia (now the state of West Virginia), were torn apart over conflicting loyalties. This story is a fictional account of one young soldier who chose to fight for his country rather than his state.

Ambrose served in the Union Army during the Civil War. He became the most famous Civil War storyteller of all time. This story was first published in the San Francisco Examiner in 1889. Years later, Bierce vanished while travel with rebel troops during the Mexican Revolutionary War in 1913.

If you haven’t yet, you should also listen to Bierce’s most famous story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” also on Litreading.

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Jack London takes us into the frozen silence of the Yukon and leaves us beside an aging chief who has reached the appointed end of his trail. As the tribe moves on, Old Koskoosh remains behind with only a small fire, a dwindling stack of wood, and the memories of a life spent obeying the relentless rhythms of nature. This is a stark, almost ceremonial meditation on aging, duty, and the brutal simplicity of the natural world. The Law of Life is one of London’s most quietly devastating works—not because of violence, but because of its honesty.

Jack London, born in 1876, rose from poverty and hard labor to become one of America’s most influential writers. A sailor, gold prospector, journalist, and social critic, he wrote with the authority of someone who had lived every inch of hardship he described. His stories of the North—lean, unsentimental, and deeply human—helped define American literary naturalism and continue to shape how we imagine life on the frontier.

If you enjoyed this story, I’d be grateful if you’d share Litreading or leave a quick review. And for more timeless stories—from classics to brand-new originals—visit ShortStoryverses.com, the home of Litreading, Readastorus, New Tales Told, FRIGHTLY!, and Season’s Readings.

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Not all dragons are fire breathing monsters bent on destruction.

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Professional baseball in United States dates back more than 150 years. It has been considered the great American sport since the 19th century. Popular sports attract rabid fans as was the case even back in 1910 when Zane Grey wrote Old Well Well.

Known for his Western novels, Zane Gray was one of the most popular authors of the 20th century. Gray was also a huge baseball fan and published a number of stories about the sport. One of the first American authors to become a millionaire, more than 100 movies were made from his popular tales.

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Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” is one of the most celebrated short stories ever written — a masterclass in subtext, restraint, and emotional tension.

Set at a train station in Spain, it captures a quiet conversation between two lovers waiting for a train — a moment in which everything that matters lies between the lines.

Presented by Litreading, part of Short Storyverses — where classic and original tales are read with depth and heart.

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Saki's recurring character, Clovis takes on an overly proud mother

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O. Henry had a gift for wrapping heartbreak in humor. His stories feel light, almost playful—until that last line hits and you realize he’s been quietly aiming for your chest the whole time.

In The Skylight Room, we meet a bright, hopeful young woman renting the smallest, loneliest room in New York. But she still finds a way to fill it—with imagination, with laughter, and with a star she names Billy Jackson.

What happens next is pure O. Henry: tender, tragic, and—somehow—still kind of beautiful.

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We reprise another classic thriller from Litreading's archives for this year's scary season,

In this episode, we go on an adventure off the coast of South America, as a famous big game hunter finds himself stranded on an island where hunting has been elevated to a new and frightening level. It’s time to play “The Most Dangerous Game.”

"The Most Dangerous Game" has been called "the most popular story ever written in English" and was made into a 1932 movie. It’s author, Richard Connell was one of the most famous American short story writers in the early 20th Century. He was also a screenwriter who won an Academy Award in 1942 for his original screenplay “Meet John Doe.”

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Kate Chopin’s Doctor Chevalier’s Lie is a moving meditation on compassion in the face of tragedy. Set against the backdrop of a harsh and unforgiving city, the story turns on a doctor’s quiet decision: whether to report what he sees with unflinching honesty, or to soften the truth for the sake of those left behind. Chopin invites us to consider the value of mercy, the weight of dignity, and the moments when a carefully chosen falsehood can become an act of profound kindness.

Kate Chopin, born in 1850, was among the first American writers to explore the hidden truths of everyday lives. Living in Louisiana, she drew on its people and culture to shape her work. Her novel The Awakening shocked readers of her time but is now praised as a classic of American realism. In her short stories, like Doctor Chevalier’s Lie, she showed how even the smallest choices can carry profound humanity.

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How can we tell the difference between benevolence and predation?

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What happens when hate overwhelms love?

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We have every reason to love these people, yet we don't.

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Every day we are bombarded by images of unattainable beauty, regaled with stories of fame, and envious of those who have attained great wealth. It’s easy to lose sight of our important contributions to the world and those around us. No matter how we have ended up , we all started as a figurative "handful of clay."

Henry van Dyke was a well-known clergyman, English professor, and author. He spent almost a quarter century teach English Literature at Princeton, while writing numerous short stories in his spare time. He also composed several verses of “My Country Tis of Thee,” America’s unofficial national anthem prior to the “Star Spangled Banner’s” gaining official anthem status in 1931.

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A young woman stumbles upon a drunk with whom she forms a bond until she learns more.

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A sick young woman is saved by a final kind gesture.

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James Joyce’s “Araby” is ranked among the pantheon of greatest short stories ever written. In this timeless coming of age tale an adolescent boy, blinded by a hormonal fog, falls for a neighbor girl.

Now considered one of the classics of literature, the 1914 collection of short stories, Dubliners, of which “Araby” was an early part was an initial failure selling less than 400 copies. Of those almost a third were purchased Joyce himself.

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Can an almost perfectly planned crime be solved? That question is answered in this classic mystery by one of the early 20th Century's most popular, fictional medical detectives, Dr. Thorndyke.

Sandwiched between the Sherlock Holmes mysteries of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the whodunnits of Agatha Christie are R. Austin Freeman's "whocatchums." Freeman pioneered the concept of the inverted detective story, in which the whole crime is explained before the investigation.

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For much of human existence we have questioned the concept of time. Is it always a constant or can it be manipulated, allowing us to move forward or backward chronologically. In this 19th century story, two cousins speculate about the age of their aunt whom they visited regularly, until they discovered the secrets of her old clock.

In 1881, several years before H.G. Wells even started writing his classic, “The Time Machine,” newspaper editor Edward Page Mitchell published his time travel story anonymously in his newspaper “The New York Sun.” Considered to be the true father of science fiction, Mitchell had penned stories about traveling father that light (1874), artificial intelligence and cryogenics (1879). Look for more stories from this lesser known sci-fi master in future episodes.

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There is a power that comes from giving without expectation of reward.
A self-sacrificing spirit is the theme for Irish author Oscar Wilde’s short story.

The Model Millionaire first appeared in print in the newspaper The World in June 1887. The story’s author, Oscar Wilde, was one of the 19th century’s most famous authors and playrights penning works like The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest.
Late in his life, Wilde served almost two years at hard labor after being convicting of violating England’s draconian laws against homosexual behavior. He died just over three years after his release at age 46.

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A fleeting glimpse in the pines, a photograph stolen from a friend’s mantel, and a correspondence born from mistaken identity—The Girl and the Photograph by Lucy Maud Montgomery is no simple tale of memory. It’s about the way chance, error, and destiny conspire to test a heart’s fidelity. What begins as a love nurtured by letters and a photograph turns into a crisis of identity, and then, at the last moment, a revelation that love had been waiting patiently all along. This isn’t just about remembering a face—it’s about recognizing a soul when it finally stands before you.

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Life has a nasty habit of throwing us curves that we can either cause us long-term misery or force us to make the best of a bad situation as illustrated in this very short tale.

Anton Chekhov was undoubtedly brilliant. A physician by trade, his premier talent was writing. Chekhov had a unparalleled gift for understanding the depths of human emotions and sharing them first through his short stories and later, his plays. Chekhov once said “Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress.”

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Virginia Woolf demonstrates how simply focusing on one thing has the power to unleash torrents of thoughts and memories.

Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in 1882, British author Virginia Woolf went on to become an icon of modern 20th century literature.

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We have been sharing stories with each other since the beginning of time. On occasion these tales have been known to grow a bit tall, as was the case when four elderly seamen spent an evening with a widow sharing a variety of yarns each one wilder than the next. Then the wood adds a tale of her own.

Frank Stockton was a 19th century author and humorist with an uncanny knack for poking fun a human failings. One of his most famous stories was "The Lady or the Tiger."

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