LitReading - Classic Short Stories and Timeless Tales

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.If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book!https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonaldor click FOLLOW Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book!https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonaldor click FOLLOW Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.comThis 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.Looking for even more stories? Check out all our narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.comIf you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonaldIf you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book!https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonaldor click FOLLOW Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book!https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonaldor click FOLLOW Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.comThis is a story from the archives recently remastered.If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book!https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonaldor click FOLLOW Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.