LitReading - Short Stories and Timeless Tales
by Short Storyverses
LitReading: Great Short Stories Read Aloud Great stories deserve to be heard. LitReading brings you a complete short stories, unabridged and narrated by veteran broadcaster and voice actor Don McDonald. Hear the masters of the form, including Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, O. Henry, Edith Wharton, Anton Chekhov, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Katherine Mansfield, Stephen Crane, Saki, Bret Harte and Virginia Woolf. Along with them come overlooked gems from the golden age of American, British and Russian literature that deserve a second hearing. Each episode is one full story, from a few minutes to a deeply immersive hour. Think of it as a free audiobook of short fiction, performed with warmth and clarity and just enough character to bring every voice to life. Play it on a commute, a walk or a quiet evening. It also makes good bedtime listening for grown-ups. Come
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Episodes
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Pigs Is Pigs by Ellis Parker Butler — Two Guinea Pigs Become an Accounting Catastrophe
This story is a small masterpiece of exasperation from 1905. Ellis Parker Butler wrote "Pigs Is Pigs" as a jab at corporate red tape, and somehow, more than a hundred years on, it has only gotten funnier. Two guinea pigs arrive at a railway express office. A clerk named Mike Flannery decides they...
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Two Hearts That Beat as One by Frank Norris — Two Friends, One Woman, and a Boxing Match
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...
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A Scandal in Bohemia by Arthur Conan Doyle — The Woman Who Outsmarted Sherlock Holmes
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....
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The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe — A Gentle Man Has Much to Confess
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...
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The Hanging Stranger by Philip K. Dick — Why Is No One Else Horrified?
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...
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Murder of Crows by Don McDonald — The Frontier Has a Long Memory
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...
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August Heat by W. F. Harvey — Two Strangers Have Until Midnight
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...
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The Willow Walk by Sinclair Lewis — A Respectable Man’s Other Life
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…
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The Rips by Don McDonald — Her World Is Coming Apart at the Seams
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...
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The Diary of a Madman by Guy de Maupassant — The Private Thoughts of a Respected Man
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…
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The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe — A Quiet Murder Makes Too Much Noise
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...
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A Haunted House by Virginia Woolf — Two Ghosts Search for What They Left Behind
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...
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The Damned Thing by Ambrose Bierce — What Killed Him Was There to Be Unseen
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....
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The Monkey’s Paw by W. W. Jacobs — Three Wishes and No Guarantees
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...
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The Pale Man by Julius Long — The Stranger Down the Hall Is Getting Closer
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...
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The Judge’s House by Bram Stoker — A Student Finds More Than Solitude
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…
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A Wireless Message by Ambrose Bierce — An Impossible Warning Far from Home
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…
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The Furnished Room by O. Henry — A Missing Woman’s Perfume Lingers
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...
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The Man with Two Lives by Ambrose Bierce — Surviving Was Only the Beginning
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...
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The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe — An Old Grudge and a Rare Wine
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...
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The Rocking-Horse Winner by D. H. Lawrence — How Much Luck Is Enough?
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...
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The Willows - Part Two by Algernon Blackwood — Something Beyond the River Is Watching
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...
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The Willows - Part One by Algernon Blackwood — Something Beyond the River Is Watching
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...
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Yuki-Onna by Lafcadio Hearn — A Promise Made in the Storm
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...
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The Hum by Don McDonald — A Widower Follows a Sound Beneath His House
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...
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Four Men in a Cave by Stephen Crane — A Little Courage, a Lot of Bravado, and Something in the Dark
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…
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The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman — Is the Cure Worse Than the Illness?
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...
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Below Ten Thousand by Don McDonald — All the Time and No Time
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...
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The McWilliamses and the Burglar Alarm by Mark Twain — Confounding Contraptions Are Nothing New
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...
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Still Water by Don McDonald — Four aircraft carriers in a lake?
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...
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The Romance of a Busy Broker by O. Henry — A Wall Street Love Story with a Twist
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…
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Autopay by Don McDonald — Following Her Dead Mother’s Credit Card
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...
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Tobermory by Saki — A Proper British Cat Tells All
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...
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His Own Voice by Don McDonald — A Graphophone Records What Was Never Said
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...
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A Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell — The Women See What the Men Miss
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...
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A Foot Too Deep by Don McDonald — A Blacksmith Chooses the Terms of a New Orleans Duel
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…
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A Slice of Life by P. G. Wodehouse — A Chemist, a Baronet and a Girl Locked Upstairs
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…
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The Wrong Funeral by Don McDonald — An Obituary Arrives Forty Years Too Late
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....
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Care Protocol, Episode One — When Self-Driving Cars Start Killing
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....
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The Garden’s Wall by Don McDonald — The Cost of Kindness in a Perfect Society
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…
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The Reticence of Lady Anne by Saki — His Wife Gives Him the Silent Treatment
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...
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The Outcasts of Poker Flat by Bret Harte — Exiled into a Deadly Sierra Snowstorm
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...
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NOT A STORY
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…
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A Wasted Day by Richard Harding Davis — The Wisest Man on Wall Street Goes to Criminal Court
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...
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The Huntsman by Anton Chekhov — An Estranged Couple Meets on a Country Road
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...
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Chain of Custody by Don McDonald — A Rabbit, Three Backyards, Several Secrets and One Patient Dog
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…
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The Long Light by Don McDonald — A Daughter Returns to the Family Lake House as Her Mother’s Memory Fades
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…
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The Nice People by H. C. Bunner — A Charming Couple Whose Stories Don’t Quite Match
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...
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The Wizard’s Touch by Alice Brown — A Portrait That's More Than a Man's Image
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...
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The Storm by Kate Chopin — A Married Woman, an Old Flame, and a Sudden Downpour
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...
About this show
LitReading: Great Short Stories Read Aloud
Great stories deserve to be heard.
LitReading brings you a complete short stories, unabridged and narrated by veteran broadcaster and voice actor Don McDonald. Hear the masters of the form, including Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, O. Henry, Edith Wharton, Anton Chekhov, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Katherine Mansfield, Stephen Crane, Saki, Bret Harte and Virginia Woolf. Along with them come overlooked gems from the golden age of American, British and Russian literature that deserve a second hearing.
Each episode is one full story, from a few minutes to a deeply immersive hour. Think of it as a free audiobook of short fiction, performed with warmth and clarity and just enough character to bring every voice to life. Play it on a commute, a walk or a quiet evening. It also makes good bedtime listening for grown-ups.
Come
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