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Best short stories and collections everyone should read.

If you are on the lookout for great storytelling but don’t want to commit to a full-length novel, then short story collections are the answer. Whether it’s just before bed, during your commute, or waiting to see your doctor, small chunks of time are perfect for reading short stories.

Here we have gathered thirty-one of the best short stories and collections , from all sorts of backgrounds and sources, to help you grow your “To Be Read” pile.

For your convenience, we've divided this post into two parts: 1. the ten best free short stories to read right now , and 2. best short story collections. Feel free to jump to the section that you prefer!

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the number of great short stories out there, you can also take our 30-second quiz below to narrow it down quickly and get a personalized short story recommendation 😉

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Free Short Stories to Read Right Now

These individual short stories are the best of the best — and the even better news is that they're available for free online for you to peruse. From classics published in the 1900s to a short story that exploded in late 2017, here are ten of the greatest free short stories for you to read.

1. “Lamb to the Slaughter” by Roald Dahl

While not exactly a philosophical or political tale like our first two examples, this twisty short story from Dahl does delve into some shady moral territory. We are introduced to Mary Maloney: a loving wife and dedicated homemaker. In just a few short paragraphs describing how she welcomes her husband home, Dahl makes us sympathize with Mary — before a rash act turns her life upside down and takes the reader with her on a dark journey.

For those who haven’t read it, we won’t spoil the rest. However, it’s safe to say that Dahl serves up a fiendish twist on a platter.

2. “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson

A perennial feature in many a high school syllabus, Shirley Jackson’s best-known short story clinically details an unusual ritual that takes place in a small town. There’s not exactly a lot of plot to spoil in The Lottery — but within a few short pages, Jackson manages to represent the mob mentality that can drive reasonable people to commit heinous acts.

3. “How to Become a Writer” by Lorrie Moore

Told in the second person point of view , this story from Moore’s debut anthology Self-Help takes an honest look at the inner life of a struggling artist. Through the use of an unusual POV, the author manages to turn her reader into a confidante — making it abundantly clear that the ‘you’ the narrator is speaking about is actually herself.

This story is a standout, but the entire collection is well worth a read for its insight, humor, and disregard for literary norms.

4. “Cat Person” by Kristen Roupenian

In the Social Media Age, no short story has gone viral the way this New Yorker contribution from Roupenian has. Arriving at the height of #MeToo, it begins with 20-year-old Margot embarking on the early stages of flirtation with an older man, Robert. As she gets to know more about this man (as well as filling in the gaps with her imagination), the power dynamic in their relationship starts to fluctuate.

Lauded for its portrayal of Margot’s inner life and the fears many modern women face when it comes to dating, it also has its fair share of detractors — many are critical of the central character, some are downright outraged by the story’s success. Still, this story undeniably struck a chord with the reading public, and will likely remain relevant for some time.

5. “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver

First published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1981, “Cathedral” is today known as one of Raymond Carver’s finest works. When it opens, we meet a narrator whose wife is expecting a visit from an old friend, a blind man. Dissatisfied and distrusting of people not like him, our narrator struggles to connect until the blind man asks him to describe a cathedral to him. 

 “Cathedral” is one of Carver’s own personal favorites, and deservedly so. His characteristic minimalist style is devastating as the story builds up to a shattering moment of emotional truth — an ultimate reminder that no-one else can capture the quiet sadness of working-class people like him. 

6. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor

Innocuously titled, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is nevertheless Flannery O’Connor’s bleakest — and most famous — work. It begins unassumingly with a Southern family who’s planning to go on a road trip. Yet the journey is rudely interrupted when their car overturns on an abandoned dirt road — and they are met by an enigmatic group of three men, coming up over the far hill. 

This short story inspired some strong reactions from the public upon publication — and the conversation continues today as to its frank depiction of the nature of good and evil. Again, we won’t spoil anything for you, except to say that “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is well worth your time. 

7. “Symbols and Signs” by Vladimir Nabokov

The famous author of Lolita wrote “Signs and Symbols” in 1948. Its premise is seemingly simple: an elderly couple visits their mentally ill son in the sanatorium in America. Yet their background and trials come into sharp focus as the story develops, until an explosive ending disrupts everyone’s peace of mind. 

As you might expect, the somber “Symbols and Signs” diverges sharply from Lolita in terms of both tone and subject — but its ending will keep you awake at night thinking about its implications.  

8. “Sticks” by George Saunders

Not so much a short story as it is flash fiction, “Sticks” is written from the perspective of a young man whose father has an unusual habit: dressing up a crucifix that’s built of out a metal pole in the yard. One of America’s greatest living short story writers, George Saunders explained: "For two years I'd been driving past a house like the one in the story, imagining the owner as a man more joyful and self-possessed and less self-conscious than myself. Then one day I got sick of him and invented his opposite, and there was the story." 

The result is a masterful piece of fiction that builds something out of seemingly nothing — all in the space of only two paragraphs. 

9. “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury

If there’s anyone who you can trust to deliver thought-provoking, terrifying science fiction on the regular, it’s Ray Bradbury. In “The Veldt,” George and Lydia Hadley have bought an automated house that comes with a “nursey,” or a virtual reality room. Worried about the nursery’s effect on the kids, George and Lydia think about turning off the nursey — but the problem is that their children are obsessed with it. 

As an ominously prescient prediction of the downside of technology, “The Veldt” is a short and shining example of how Ray Bradbury was an author before his time. 

10. “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes

In this classic short story, we are privy to the journals of Charlie Gordon, a cleaner with an IQ of 68. ("I reely wantd to lern I wantid it more even then pepul who are smarter even then me. All my life I wantid to be smart and not dumb.”) Charlie’s luck changes when he is selected for an experiment that purports to turn him into a genius — but everything that goes up must come down in the end. 

“Flowers for Algernon” won the Hugo Award in 1960 for its groundbreaking presentation. Heartbreaking and rich with subtle poignance, it is likely to remain a staple for centuries to come.  

Best Short Story Collections to Devour

If you'd like many short stories at your fingertips all at once, short story collections are where you should look. Here, we've collected 21 of the best short story collections — along with the standout story in each volume.

11. A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin

Standout Story: “A Manual for Cleaning Women”

12. Blow-up and Other Stories by Julio Cortázar

Standout Story: “House Taken Over”

13. Drifting House by Krys Lee

Standout Story: “Drifting House”

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14. Dubliners by James Joyce

Standout Story: “The Dead”

15. Everything’s Eventual: 14 Dark Tales by Stephen King

Standout Story: “Riding the Bullet”

16. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

Standout Story: “The Garden of Forking Paths”

17. Florida by Lauren Groff

Standout Story: “Above and Below”

18. Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders by Neil Gaiman

Standout Story: “The Flints of Memory Lane”

19. Kiss Kiss by Roald Dahl

Standout Story: “The Pig”

20. Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami

Standout Story: “Samsa in Love”

21. Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger

Standout Story: “For Esme - With Love and Squalor”

22. Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

Standout Story: “In a Bamboo Grove”

23. Runaway by Alice Munro

Standout Story: “Runaway”

24. Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel García Márquez

Standout Story: “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow”

25. The Collected Stories by Grace Paley

Standout Story: “A Man Told Me the Story of His Life”

26. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway by Ernest Hemingway

Standout Story: “Hills Like White Elephants”

27. The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

Standout Story: “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

28. The Essential Tales of Chekhov by Anton Chekhov

Standout Story: “The Lady with the Dog”

29. The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Standout Story: “I’d Love You to Want Me”

30. The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Standout Story: “The Thing Around Your Neck”

31. The Youngest Doll by Rosario Ferré

Standout Story: “When Women Love Men”

Ready to write your own short story? Check out these short story ideas for all your inspiration needs.

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Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Ann Johnson; April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014) was an American author and poet. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, and several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning more than fifty years. She received dozens of awards and over thirty honorary doctoral degrees. Angelou is best known for her series of seven autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of seventeen, and brought her international recognition and acclaim. Angelou's long list of occupations has included pimp, prostitute, night-club dancer and performer, cast-member of the musical Porgy and Bess, coordinator for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, author, journalist in Egypt and Ghana during the days of decolonization, and actor, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs.

#AmericanWriters #BlackWriters #FemaleWriters

The Edgar Allan Poe Complete Works Collection - Stories, Poems, Novels, and Essays

By: Edgar Allan Poe

• Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble , Peter Noble
• Length: 59 hrs and 59 mins
• 4.3 out of 5 stars 4.3 (22 ratings)

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The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft

By: H. P. Lovecraft

• Narrated by: Andrew Leman, Sean Branney
• Length: 51 hrs and 40 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 2,244
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 1,794
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 1,787

For the first time ever, the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society has produced an audio recording of all of Lovecraft's stories. These are not dramatizations like our Dark Adventure Radio Theatre - rather, this is an audiobook of the original stories, in all-new, never-before-heard recordings made by the HPLHS' own Andrew Leman and Sean Branney exclusively for this collection. This collection spans his entire career from his earliest surviving works of childhood to stories completed shortly before his death. All tales include original music by HPLHS composer Troy Sterling Nies.

• 5 out of 5 stars

Best Lovecraft Collection on Audible!

• By Aransas R. on 04-30-19

The Ultimate Horror Collection: 60+ Novels and Stories from H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, M.R. James, Bram Stoker, Henry James, Mary Shelley, and More

• Frankenstein; Dracula; Jekyll and Hyde; Carmilla; The Fall of the House of Usher; The Call of Cthulhu; The Turn of the Screw; The Mezzotint; and More
• By: H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, M. R. James, and others
• Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble, Peter Noble, Malk Williams, and others
• Length: 93 hrs and 12 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 22
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 18
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 18

The Ultimate Horror Collection is a fully-indexed collection of over 60 classic horror stories, read by four Audie-winning narrators. Included here are stories by H.P. Lovecraft; Edgar Allan Poe; M.R. James; Oscar Wilde; Joseph Le Fanu; Bram Stoker; Mary Shelley; Robert Louis Stevenson; and Henry James.

The Best Horror Collection on Audible!

• By Anonymous User on 08-31-22

By: H. P. Lovecraft , and others

Ghost Stories: Stephen Fry's Definitive Collection

• By: Stephen Fry, Washington Irving, M.R. James, and others
• Narrated by: Stephen Fry
• Length: 8 hrs and 18 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 346
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 297
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 297

As the days grow shorter and the temperature drops, Halloween approaches. Come, brave listener, pull up a chair, and spend some time with master storyteller Stephen Fry as he tells us some of his favourite ghost stories of all time, in truly terrifying spatial audio. From the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow to the tortured spirits of M.R. James, from Edgar Allan Poe’s terrifying tale of a doppelganger to Charlotte Riddell’s Open Door that should definitely stay shut, join Stephen as he tells you some truly terrifying tales.

• 4 out of 5 stars

Wonderful narration. Mediocre stories.

• By Michael Fuchs on 11-07-23

By: Stephen Fry , and others

The Leo Tolstoy Complete Collection

• War and Peace; Anna Karenina; Resurrection; Short Stories; Novellas; and Non-Fiction

By: Leo Tolstoy

• Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble, Malk Williams, Emma Gregory
• Length: 186 hrs and 39 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 7
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 4
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 4

Leo Tolstoy: The Complete Collection includes unabridged recordings of Leo Tolstoy's 3 timeless novels; all his major novellas and short stories; and 4 renowned works of non-fiction in one audiobook, all read by Audie Award-winning narrators.

The Complete Sherlock Holmes

• The Heirloom Collection

By: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

• Narrated by: Simon Vance
• Length: 58 hrs and 4 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 8,749
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 7,969
• Story 5 out of 5 stars 7,956

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales are rightly ranked among the seminal works of mystery and detective fiction. Included in this collection are all four full-length Holmes novels and more than forty short masterpieces - from the inaugural adventure A Study in Scarlet to timeless favorites like “The Speckled Band” and more. At the center of each stands the iconic figure of Holmes - brilliant, eccentric, and capable of amazing feats of deductive reasoning.

A Table of Contents & Audible Part/Chapter Notes

• By SantaFePainter on 11-18-13

The Edgar Allan Poe Audio Collection

• Narrated by: Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone
• Length: 5 hrs and 31 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 614
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 416
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 413

Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone brilliantly interpret twenty of Edgar Allan Poe's most chilling stories and poems - an unforgettably intense listening experience!

Excellent performance, poor formatting.

• By tom on 10-24-11

M.R. James: The Complete Ghost Stories Collection

By: M. R. James

• Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
• Length: 18 hrs and 42 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 85
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 66
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 66

For the first time, the complete works of M. R. James are available to download in one collection. This unabridged collection of all M.R. James' ghost stories includes tales from Ghost Stories of an Antiquary , More Ghost Stories , A Thin Ghost and Others , and A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories . It is expertly read by award-winning narrator Jonathan Keeble.

• By Mardou Fox on 08-09-22

Edgar Allan Poe - The Complete Stories and Poems

• Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble, Peter Noble
• Length: 36 hrs and 34 mins
• Overall 5 out of 5 stars 8
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 6
• Story 5 out of 5 stars 6

Edgar Allan Poe was a writer, poet, editor and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre, and is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and of American literature. Poe was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story and considered to be the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction.

The Perfect Poe Companion

• By Anonymous User on 05-26-22

The Haunting of Hill House

By: Shirley Jackson

• Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
• Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 10,602
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 9,423
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 9,427

Four seekers have come to the ugly, abandoned old mansion: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of the psychic phenomenon called haunting; Theodora, his lovely and lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a lonely, homeless girl well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the adventurous future heir of Hill House.

Well written horror tale

• By C K White on 02-11-14

Slayers: A Buffyverse Story

• By: Christopher Golden, Amber Benson
• Narrated by: Amber Benson, Charisma Carpenter, James Charles Leary, and others
• Length: 8 hrs and 2 mins
• Original Recording
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 2,292
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 2,149
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 2,148

Original cast members from the beloved TV series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer , reunite for an all-new adventure about connections that never die—even if you bury them. A decade has passed since the epic final battle that concluded Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV). The game-changing spell that gave power to all potential Slayers persists. With new Slayers constantly emerging, things are looking grim for the bad guys.

A dream come true

• By Anonymous User on 10-12-23

By: Christopher Golden , and others

Necronomicon

• Narrated by: Richard Powers, Bronson Pinchot, Stephen R. Thorne, and others
• Length: 21 hrs and 1 min
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 7,008
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 6,365
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 6,353

Originally written for the pulp magazines of the 1920s and '30s, H. P. Lovecraft's astonishing tales blend elements of horror, science fiction, and cosmic terror that are as powerful today as they were when first published. This tome brings together all of Lovecraft's harrowing stories, including the complete Cthulhu Mythos cycle, just the way they were when first released.

This has bugged me for a while...

• By mike on 06-23-16

Mark Twain - The Complete Novels

By: Mark Twain

• Narrated by: Lee Howard
• Length: 58 hrs and 33 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 114
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 93
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 93

Here you will find the complete novels of Mark Twain: 1. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Starts at Chapter 1, 2. The Prince and the Pauper Starts at Chapter 37, 3. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Starts at Chapter 70, 4. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court Starts at Chapter 113, 5. The American Claimant Starts at Chapter 158, 6. Tom Sawyer Abroad Starts at Chapter 184, 7. Pudd'nhead Wilson Starts at Chapter 197, 8. Tom Sawyer, Detective Starts at Chapter 219, 9. A Horse's Tale Starts at Chapter 230, 10. The Mysterious Stranger Starts at Chapter 245.

• 3 out of 5 stars

Content; GREAT! Performance.. .not so much😁

• By brian deis on 01-09-20

The Price of Fear: 20 Tales of Suspense Told by Vincent Price

• A BBC Radio 4 Vintage Horror Series
• By: William Ingram, Richard Davies, Maurice Travers, and others
• Narrated by: Vincent Price, Maurice Denham, Annette Crosbie, and others
• Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 63
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 50
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 50

Twenty tales of terror and suspense, brought to you by sinister storyteller Vincent Price. Horror legend Vincent Price presents an anthology of eerie, unsettling tales with a devilish twist - some purportedly based on his own adventures, others narrated by him in his own inimitable style.

pure cozy spooky bliss

• By Luke on 03-25-22

By: William Ingram , and others

The Fall of the House of Usher

• Narrated by: William Roberts
• Length: 50 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 257
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 227
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 224

This is a story from the Fall of the House of Usher collection. The horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, with its dungeon of death, and the overhanging gloom on the House of Usher demonstrate unforgettably the unique imagination of Edgar Allan Poe. Unerringly, he touches upon some of our greatest nightmares: Premature burial, ghostly transformation, words from beyond the grave. Written in the 1840s, they have retained their power to shock and frighten even now.

Well read narration!

• By Robert E. Wilkins on 01-26-19

Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

• By: Thomas Ligotti, Jeff VanderMeer - foreword
• Narrated by: Jon Padgett, Linda Jones
• Length: 21 hrs and 54 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 67
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 50

Thomas Ligotti’s debut collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer , and his second, Grimscribe , permanently inscribed a new name in the pantheon of horror fiction. Influenced by the strange terrors of Lovecraft and Poe and by the brutal absurdity of Kafka, Ligotti eschews cheap, gory thrills for his own brand of horror, which shocks at the deepest, existential, levels.

Incredible!

• By Erik McHatton on 02-27-23

By: Thomas Ligotti , and others

Something Wicked This Way Comes

By: Ray Bradbury

• Narrated by: Christian Rummel
• Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 6,206
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 5,625
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 5,630

A carnival rolls in sometime after the midnight hour on a chill Midwestern October eve, ushering in Halloween a week before its time. A calliope's shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. In this season of dying, Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery.

It's so creepy

• By Midwestbonsai on 11-14-14

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

• Narrated by: Kerry Shale
• Length: 1 hr and 29 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 128
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 106
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 107

This is a story from the Murders in the Rue Morgue (The Dupin Stories) collection. Auguste Dupin, investigator extraordinaire, was the remarkable creation of Edgar Allan Poe. Written in the 1840s, Poe presented the acutely observant, shrewd but idiosyncratic character who, with his chronicler, provided the inspiration for the more famous Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

Suspense at its finest

• By Webb Patterson on 04-16-18

The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Stories (AmazonClassics Edition)

• Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
• Length: 10 hrs and 35 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 40
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 35
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 35

Edgar Allan Poe elevated the gothic story, developed the unreliable narrator, recast psychological terror, and reveled in both the horror and the supernal beauty of death. From Poe's rich, unrivaled imagination comes a collection of his most masterful works, including "The Black Cat", "The Fall of the House of Usher", and, of course, "The Tell-Tale Heart". Each story explores morbid themes of grief, greed, fear, and guilt, and together they embody Poe's grotesque obsessions...even the dread of being buried alive.

Didn't fully track it, but still, I enjoyed it!

• By Jennifer Greenlees on 10-02-20

Publisher's summary

This is the complete collection of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories, poems, novels and essays, read by Audie Award-winning actors Peter Noble and Jonathan Keeble.

This collection contains more than 160 of Poe's short stories, poems, his two novels, and a selection of his essays, including:

• 'The Raven'
• 'The Black Cat'
• 'The Fall of the House of Usher'
• 'The Gold-Bug'
• 'The Masque of the Red Death'
• 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue'
• 'The Pit and the Pendulum'
• 'The Tell-Tale Heart'
• 'Annabel Lee'
• 'The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar'
• 'William Wilson'
• 'The Valley of Unrest'
• 'The Village Street'
• 'The Cask of Amontillado'
• 'The Haunted Palace'
• 'The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket'
• 'The Philosophy of Composition'
• 'The Philosophy of Furniture'
• 'The Poetic Principle'
• 'The Rationale of Verse'
• Plus many more!
• Unabridged Audiobook
• Categories: Literature & Fiction

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• Narrated by: Philippe Duquenoy
• Length: 48 hrs and 26 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 465
• Performance 3.5 out of 5 stars 390
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 382

Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most prolific authors of his time, eventually gaining recognition for his tales of horror and his uncanny ability to paint a macabre picture with words. The Complete Works Collection of Edgar Allan Poe contains over 150 stories and poems, separated into individual chapters, including all of Poe's most notorious works such as The Raven , Annabel Lee , A Dream Within a Dream , Lenore , The Tell-Tale Heart , and many more.

Would recommend to anyone!!!

• By Gail Blackwell on 03-14-18

The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 1

• Narrated by: Nicholas Stikoski
• Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 56
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 52
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 50

A collection of classic works by Edgar Allan Poe, American author, poet, editor, and literary critic. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

Poor narration hurts these Poe classics

• By Jeremy C. Kuban on 11-29-12

Dombey and Son

By: Charles Dickens

• Narrated by: Frederick Davidson
• Length: 36 hrs and 59 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 123
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 68

In this carefully crafted novel, Dickens reveals the complexity of London society in the enterprising 1840s as he takes the listener into the business firm and home of one of its most representative patriarchs, Paul Dombey.

Perfect pair

• By Philip on 03-25-08

The Bondwoman's Narrative

• By: Hannah Crafts, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
• Narrated by: Anna Deavere Smith
• Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 188
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 104
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 105

An unprecedented historical and literary event, this tale written in the 1850s is the only known novel by a female African American slave, and quite possibly the first novel written by a black woman anywhere. A work recently uncovered by renowned scholar and professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., it is a stirring tale of "passing" and the adventures of a young slave as she makes her way to freedom.

• 1 out of 5 stars

Poor reading of an important book

• By Hilary on 11-15-04

By: Hannah Crafts , and others

What Is Man?

• Narrated by: Carl Reiner
• Length: 3 hrs
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 60
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 51

What Is Man? appears in the form of a Socratic dialogue between a romantic young idealist and an elderly cynic, who debate issues of mankind, such as whether man is free to act or is more of a machine, whether personal merit is meaningless given how the environment shapes us, and whether man truly has impulses other than to pursue pleasure and avoid pain.

I'm 21, this shit was crazy. But I loved it.

• By Trina on 10-16-17

The Coming Race

By: Edward Bulwer Lytton

• Narrated by: William Hope
• Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 86
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 77
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 76

Edward Bulwer-Lytton's book is ostensibly a work of Science Fiction. It deals with an underground race of advanced beings, masters of Vril energy - a strange power that can both heal and destroy - who intend to leave their subterranean existence and conquer the world. But the book has been seen by many as a barely concealed account of Hidden Wisdom, a theory that has attracted many strange bed-fellows, including the French author Louis Jacolliot, the Polish explorer Ferdinand Ossendowsky, and Adolf Hitler.

dated - worked to get through it

• By Cat Lover who doesn't work out on 10-10-19

The Vampyre

By: John Polidori

• Narrated by: B.J. Harrison
• Length: 59 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 252
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 228
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 226

Young, impressionable Aubrey is fascinated by the enigmatic Lord Ruthven, and accompanies him on a tour to Europe. But Aubrey develops a growing distaste for Lord Ruthven’s sinister and grotesque conduct - especially as it concerns human blood. This novella, penned during that tempestuous night in Switzerland amongst such notables as Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley, served as the great inspiration for Bram Stoker to create Dracula .

Kicking it oldschool

• By Rebecca on 08-13-12

Self Reliance

By: Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Narrated by: Alana Munro
• Length: 1 hr and 20 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 1,015
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 857
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 847

The most thorough statement of one of Emerson's recurrent themes, the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his or her own instincts and ideas. It is the source of one of Emerson's most famous quotations, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." This essay is a considered a watershed moment in which transcendentalism became a major cultural movement. An American classic.

Don't buy this

• By Leah L on 07-31-16

Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Narrated by: Jeff Riggenbach
• Length: 14 hrs and 1 min
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 116
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 105
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 100

Here in one volume are both the Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series from one of the most influential philosophers in American history. Although Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps America’s most famous philosopher, did not wish to be referred to as a transcendentalist, he is nevertheless considered the founder of this major movement of nineteenth-century American thought. Emerson was influenced by a liberal religious training; theological study; personal contact with the Romanticists Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth; and a strong indigenous sense of individualism and self-reliance.

Riggenbach's Essays, Not Emerson's

• By Jake Behm on 12-01-15

The Prince and the Pauper

• Narrated by: Steve West
• Length: 7 hrs and 25 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 151
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 128
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 128

They look alike, but they live in very different worlds. Tom Canty, impoverished and abused by his father, is fascinated with royalty. Edward Tudor, heir to the throne of England, is kind and generous but wants to run free and play in the river - just once. How insubstantial their differences truly are becomes clear when a chance encounter leads to an exchange of clothing - and roles. The pauper finds himself caught up in the pomp and folly of the royal court, and the prince wanders horror-stricken through the lower strata of English society.

Wonderful author, terrific narrator, splendid book

• By Rahni on 10-01-17

The Birthmark

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Narrated by: Walter Covell
• Length: 42 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 73
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 64
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 64

Hawthorne approached the Romantic notion of the ability of science to destroy art (or beauty) in the form of fictive "horror stories" of biological research out of control. This story is the best of that group. A devoted scientist marries a beautiful woman with a single physical flaw: a birthmark on her face. Aylmer becomes obsessed with the imperfection and his attempts to remove it via his scientific skills, thus rendering his bride perfect.

• 2 out of 5 stars

Bland uninspired

• By Holcomb on 10-02-12

By: Sir Walter Scott

• Narrated by: David Rintoul
• Length: 17 hrs and 9 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 137
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 118
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 117

Waverley by Sir Walter Scott is an enthralling tale of love, war and divided loyalties. Taking place during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, the novel tells the story of proud English officer Edward Waverley. After being posted to Dundee, Edward eventually befriends chieftain of the Highland Clan Mac-Ivor and falls in love with his beautiful sister Flora. He then renounces his former loyalties in order actively to support Scotland in open rebellion against the Union with England. The book depicts stunning, romantic panoramas of the Highlands.

• By Tad Davis on 04-12-18

Measure for Measure

By: William Shakespeare

• Narrated by: Royal Shakespeare Company
• Length: 2 hrs and 27 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 44
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 28
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 27

A performance of the tragi-comedy by the Royal Shakespeare Company. When a young woman is offered the choice of saving a man's life at the price of her own chastity, what should she do? The political and moral corruption of Vienna has driven Duke Vincentio into hiding while his deputy governor, Angelo, is left to revive the old discipline of civic authority. Angelo's first act is to imprison Claudio, a young nobleman who has gotten his betrothed, Juliet, with child.

Highly recommended

• By Todd on 10-16-08

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror

By: Robert Louis Stevenson

• Narrated by: Michael Kitchen
• Length: 5 hrs and 14 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 200
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 163
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 162

This dark psychological fantasy is more than a moral tale. It is also a product of its time, drawing on contemporary theories of class, evolution and criminality, and the secret lives behind Victorian propriety, to create a unique form of urban Gothic.

The Dark Human Heart

• By Jefferson on 01-30-11

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

By: Henry Fielding

• Narrated by: Kenneth Danzinger
• Length: 35 hrs and 53 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 260
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 204
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 203

A foundling of mysterious parentage, Tom Jones is brought up by the benevolent and wealthy Squire Allworthy as his own son. Tom falls in love with the beautiful and unattainable Sophia Western, a neighbor’s daughter, whose marriage has already been arranged. When Tom’s sexual misadventures around the countryside get him banished, he sets out to make his fortune and find his true identity.

Well read, many accents, older recording

• By Elizabeth on 12-16-10

The Confessions

By: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

• Length: 30 hrs
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 57
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 49
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 47

Dr. Johnson may have been correct in saying that “Rousseau was a very bad man,” but none can argue that his ideas are among the most influential in all of world history. It was Rousseau, the father of the romantic movement, who was responsible for introducing at least two modern day thoughts that pervade academia. The Confessions is Rousseau’s landmark autobiography. Both brilliant and flawed, it is nonetheless beautifully written and remains one of the most moving human documents in all of literature.

Extraordinary in its ordinariness...

• By Varni-Maree on 08-28-12

Vicar of Wakefield

By: Oliver Goldsmith

• Narrated by: Patrick Tull
• Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 71
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 46
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 49

The simple village vicar, Mr. Primrose, is living with his wife and six children in complete tranquility until unexpected calamities force them to weather one hilarious adventure after another. Goldsmith plays out this classic comedy of manners with a light, ironic touch that is irresistibly charming.

Snidely Whiplash Ravishes Hapless Maidens

• By Joseph R on 12-26-09

The Roman Way

By: Edith Hamilton

• Narrated by: Nadia May
• Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 193
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 146
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 146

Edith Hamilton shows us Rome through the eyes of the Romans. Plautus and Terence, Cicero and Caesar, Catullus, Horace, Virgil, and Augustus come to life in their ambitions, their work, their loves and hates. In them we see reflected a picture of Roman life very different from that fixed in our minds through schoolroom days, and far livelier.

• By steve on 04-25-11

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Finnegans Wake

By: James Joyce

• Narrated by: Barry McGovern, Marcella Riordan
• Length: 29 hrs and 18 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 100
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 80
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 79

Finnegans Wake is the greatest challenge in 20th-century literature. Who is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker? And what did he get up to in Phoenix Park? And what did Anna Livia Plurabelle have to say about it? In the rich nighttime and the language of dreams, here are history, anecdote, myth, folk tale and, above all, a wondrous sense of humor, colored by a clear sense of humanity. In this exceptional reading by the Irish actor Barry McGovern, with Marcella Riordan, the world of the Wake is more accessible than ever before.

The keys to. Given!

• By hyand on 06-16-21

Great Radio Science Fiction

• By: Robert Heinlein, Arch Oboler, Isaac Asimov
• Narrated by: Orson Welles, Aldous Huxley, Old Time Radio
• Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 44
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 38
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 37

Close your eyes and see the future. Radio often explored the issues of the day by imagining the days to come - and never did it better than in the stories you'll hear in this collection! From 2000 Plus to Dimension X , this is Great Radio Science Fiction !

• By Touch of Gray on 07-16-21

By: Robert Heinlein , and others

Edgar Allan Poe - The Complete Short Stories

• Narrated by: Bob Thomley
• Length: 16 hrs and 34 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 1,309
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 1,157
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 1,164

All of Edgar Allan Poe’s great short stories in one 16-hour collection.

• By Jim "The Impatient" on 11-23-15

Edgar Allan Poe

• The Complete Audio Collection, Vol. 1
• Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne, Ray Chase, Donald Corren, and others
• Length: 44 hrs and 49 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 168
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 135
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 136

Gothic master Edgar Allan Poe's complete works are collected in this multivolume set by Blackstone Audio. Here are his short stories, detective fiction, and poems in all their mysterious and macabre glory. Also included are Poe's literary reviews and editorial musings, comprising an often caustic analysis of the poetry, drama, and fiction of the period.

no chapters

• By fcogpr on 07-09-17

The Complete Short Stories

By: J. G. Ballard

• Narrated by: Ric Jerrrom, William Gaminara, Sean Barrett, and others
• Length: 63 hrs and 21 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 91
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 79
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 82

A collection of 98 enthralling and pulse-quickening stories, spanning five decades, venerates the remarkable imagination of J. G. Ballard. With a body of work unparalleled in twentieth-century literature, J. G. Ballard is recognized as one of the greatest and most prophetic writers in the world. With the much-hailed release of The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard, readers now have a means to celebrate the unmatched range and mesmerizing cadences of a literary genius.

Story Title List

• By Kevin on 05-16-21

The Greek Histories

• The Sweeping History of Ancient Greece as Told by Its First Chroniclers: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch
• By: Mary Lefkowitz, James Romm
• Narrated by: Vivienne Leheny
• Length: 18 hrs and 29 mins
• Overall 5 out of 5 stars 7
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 7
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 7

The historians of ancient Greece were pioneers of a new literary craft; their work stands among the world’s most enduring and important legacies and forms the foundation of a major modern discipline. This easy-to-follow edition includes new and newly revised translations of selections from Herodotus - often called the “father of history” - Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch, the four greatest Greek innovators of historical narrative. Here the listener will find their most important, and most widely taught, passages collected in a single volume. 

Great material....

• By Nom de Guerre on 01-30-22

By: Mary Lefkowitz , and others

Middlemarch (AmazonClassics Edition)

By: George Eliot

• Narrated by: Jayne Entwistle
• Length: 36 hrs and 3 mins
• Overall 5 out of 5 stars 16
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 14
• Story 5 out of 5 stars 13

Young, ardent Dorothea Brooke defies her sister by wedding the much older Reverend Edward Casaubon, blindly hoping to assist in his scholarly pursuits. Tertius Lydgate, a progressive doctor, new and unwelcome in provincial Middlemarch, is charmed into marriage with the selfish and shallow Rosamond Vincy, a disastrous mismatch of his own. Soon blatant stubbornness, unruly jealousy, blind idealism, and calculated blackmail threaten to upend the Midlands village and lay waste to happy endings.

EXCELLENT SUPERB NARRATOR

• By HOWARD SLATKIN on 03-13-22

Winnie the Pooh: The Collected Stories

• Winnie the Pooh & The House at Pooh Corner

By: A.A. Milne

• Narrated by: Barnaby Edwards
• Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
• Overall 5 out of 5 stars 2
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 2
• Story 5 out of 5 stars 2

This audiobook includes unabridged recordings of A.A. Milne's first two collections of Pooh stories, Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. Adventures in the Hundred Acre Wood include rescuing Pooh from a tight situation, discovering the North Pole and saving Piglet from the Great Flood in an upturned umbrella. And then we return to the Hundred Acre Wood in A.A. Milne's second collection of Pooh stories, The House at Pooh Corner. Joining them for the first time is the bounciest of them all, Tigger, who leads us into unforgettable adventures.

Pride & Prejudice

By: Jane Austen

• Narrated by: Marnye Young, Ramón de Ocampo
• Length: 13 hrs and 11 mins
• Overall 5 out of 5 stars 29
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 25
• Story 5 out of 5 stars 25

Set in a small English village during 1812, this classic novel is one of the greatest love stories ever told! A poor country squire is trying to find husbands for his five daughters. When one of them, Elizabeth, meets rich Mr. Darcy at a dance, they don’t find much in common. But during the next few months, they overcome their differences and fall in love.

A classic reborn

• By Heather Leigh on 05-07-22

Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Essays

• Narrated by: Peter Noble
• Length: 11 hrs and 19 mins
• Overall 0 out of 5 stars 0
• Performance 0 out of 5 stars 0
• Story 0 out of 5 stars 0

The Maine Woods

By: Henry David Thoreau

• Narrated by: Duncan Brownlehe
• Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins
• Overall 5 out of 5 stars 26
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 20
• Story 5 out of 5 stars 20

Thoreau gives an account of three canoe and hiking journeys - by himself and with others - through the mostly uninhabited forests of Maine in the 1850s. Identifying birds, trees and plants by their botanical as well as their common names, he also records the Indian names of lakes, rivers and plants. He investigates the connections between waterways and trails, and provides detail on camping, fishing and hunting in the woods, using whatever is at hand. Extolling the beauty of the wilds that he encounters, Thorough’s narrative is also imbued with elements of his philosophy.

Listened to this at least 3 times

• By Teagan MacEachern on 01-30-23

• By: Neil Gaiman - contributor, George R. R. Martin - editor, Gillian Flynn - contributor, and others
• Narrated by: Janis Ian, Gwendoline Christie, Roy Dotrice, and others
• Length: 31 hrs and 15 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 2,872
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 2,565
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 2,559

If you’re a fan of fiction that is more than just black and white, this latest story collection from number-one New York Times best-selling author George R. R. Martin and award-winning editor Gardner Dozois is filled with subtle shades of gray. Twenty-one all-original stories, by an all-star list of contributors, will delight and astonish you in equal measure with their cunning twists and dazzling reversals. And George R. R. Martin himself offers a brand-new A Game of Thrones tale chronicling one of the biggest rogues in the entire history of Ice and Fire.

A fun way to sample Authors- More Rothfuss Please!

• By gc on 08-31-14

By: Neil Gaiman - contributor , and others

Around the World in 80 Books

By: David Damrosch

• Narrated by: David Damrosch
• Length: 12 hrs and 56 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 28
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 25
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 25

Inspired by Jules Verne’s hero Phileas Fogg, David Damrosch, chair of Harvard University’s department of comparative literature and founder of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature, set out to counter a pandemic’s restrictions on travel by exploring 80 exceptional books from around the globe.

What a fantastic book!

• By Sarah on 01-21-23

On the Origin of Species

By: Charles Darwin

• Narrated by: Peter Wickham
• Length: 21 hrs and 2 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 328
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 278
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 274

Perhaps the most influential science book ever written, On the Origin of Species has continued to fascinate for more than a century after its initial publication. Its controversial theory that populations evolve and adapt through a process known as natural selection led to heated scientific, philosophical, and religious debate, revolutionizing every discipline in its wake. With its clear, concise, and surprisingly enjoyable prose, On the Origin of Species is both captivating and edifying.

Wonderful book - tough listen

• By Henry on 03-22-18

What listeners say about The Edgar Allan Poe Complete Works Collection - Stories, Poems, Novels, and Essays

• 4.5 out of 5 stars 4.3 out of 5.0
• 4.5 out of 5 stars 4.4 out of 5.0
• 4 out of 5 stars 4.1 out of 5.0

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Audible.com reviews, amazon reviews.

• Overall 5 out of 5 stars
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars
• Story 5 out of 5 stars

Forevermore…

…will I remember the writing and intellectual contributions of Poe to the world. Prior to hearing about his fascinating involvement in early American metaphysical circles, I’d only known his more popular horror stories and poems. He is so much deeper and I will never forget several of the longer works, like the epic adventure of Arthur Gordan Pym of Nantucket. Narration is beautiful. I’m not a big fan of poetry, even from a great mind like EEP, so can’t say much about that.;

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7 people found this helpful

• Jesse Richards

Now THIS is the Poe collection to get!

Fully, properly indexed, featuring probably the best audiobook performances I’ve ever heard, by two readers who fully understand and authentically convey the intensity of the work. If you have any doubts start right with Ligeia and you’ll be hooked! There is no need for any other Poe audio collection besides this one.

11 people found this helpful

• Anonymous User

The Finest Poe Collection

This collection, expertly read with true understanding and enthusiasm by Jonathan Keeble, is one of my favorite things I've listened to on Audible. Poe is an incredible storyteller and it's a pleasure to be taken through all his stories in safe hands. Unlike many others, this collection is FULLY INDEXED so you can easily find which story/poem you are looking for. A great bonus. FULL CHAPTER LISTING Track 1: Opening Credits Short Stories Track 2: A Descent Into The Maelstrom Track 3: A Predicament Track 4: A Tale of Jerusalem Track 5: A Tale of the Ragged Mountains Track 6: Berenice Track 7: Bon Bon Track 8: Diddling Track 9: Eleonora Track 10: Four Beasts in One Track 11: Hop Frog Track 12: How to Write a Blackwood Article Track 13: King Pest Track 14: Landors Cottage Track 15: Ligeia Track 16: Lionising Track 17: Loss of Breath Track 18: Mellonta Tauta Track 19: Mesmeric_Revelation Track 20: Metzengerstein Track 21: Morella Track 22: Manuscript Found in a Bottle Track 23: Mysification Track 24: Never Bet the Devil Your Head Track 25: Shadow, A Parable Track 26: Silence, A Fable Track 27: Some Words with a Mummy Track 28: The Angel of the Odd Track 29: The Assignation Track 30: The Black Cat Track 31: The Business Man Track 32: The Cask of Amontillado Track 33: The Colloquy of Monos and Una Track 34: The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion Track 35: The Devil in the Belfry Track 36: The Domain of Arnheim Track 37: The Duc de Lomelette Track 38: The Facts in the Case of M Valdemar Track 39: The Fall of the House of Usher Track 40: The Gold Bug, Part 1 Track 41: The Gold Bug, Part 2 Track 42: The Imp of the Pervers Track 43: The Island of the Fay Track 44: The Lighthouse Track 45: The Literary Life of Thingum Bob Esq Track 46: The Man of the Crowd Track 47: The Man That Was Used Up Track 48: The Masque of the Red Death Track 49: The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Part 1 Track 50: The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Part 2 Track 51: The Mystery of Marie Roget, Part 1 Track 52: The Mystery of Marie Roget, Part 2 Track 53: The Oblong Box Track 54: The Oval Portrait Track 55: The Pit and the Pendulum Track 56: The Power of Words Track 57: The Premature Burial Track 58: The Purloined Letter Track 59: The Spectacles Track 60: The Sphinx Track 61: The System of Dr Tar and Professor Feather Track 62: The Tell-Tale Heart Track 63: The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade Track 64: The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall, Part 1 Track 65: The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall, Part 2 Track 66: Thou Art The Man Track 67: Three Sundays in a Week Track 68: Von Kempelen and his Discovery Track 69: Why the Little Frenchman Wears his Hand in a Sling Track 70: William Wilson Track 71: Xing a Paragrab Poems Track 72: A Campaign Song Track 73: A Dream Track 74: A Dream Within a Dream Track 75: A Paean Track 76: A Valentine Track 77: An Acrostic Track 78: Al Aaraaf Track 79: Alone Track 80: An Enigma Track 81: Annabel Lee Track 82: Beloved Physician Track 83: Bridal Ballad Track 84: Deep in Eart Track 85: The Divine Right of Kings Track 86: Dream land Track 87: Eldorado Track 88: Elizabeth Track 89: Enigma Track 90: Epigram for Wall Street Track 91: Eulalie A Song Track 92: Evangeline Track 93: Evening Star Track 94: Fairy Land Track 95: Fanny Track 96: For Annie Track 97: Hymn Track 98: Hymn to Aristogeiton and Harmodius Track 99: Imitation Track 100: In Youth I Have Known One Track 101: Impromptu To Kate Carol Track 102: Israfel Track 103: Latin Hmyn Track 104: Lenore Track 105: Lines on Ale Track 106: Lines Written on an Album Track 107: Lines on Joe Locke Track 108: May Queeen Ode Track 109: O Tempora O Mores Track 110: Poetry Track 111: Romance Track 112: Serenade Track 113: Silence Track 114: The Sleeper Track 115: Song Track 116: Sonnet to Science Track 117: Sonnnet to Zante Track 118: Spirits of the Dead Track 119: Spiritual Song Track 120: Stanzas Track 121: Tamerlane Track 122: The Bells Track 123: The City in the Sea Track 124: The Coliseum Track 125: The Conqueror Worm Track 126: The Forest Reverie Track 127: The Happiest Day Track 128: The Haunted Palace Track 129: The Lake Track 130: The Raven Track 131: The Valley of Unrest Track 132: The Village Street Track 133: To 1829, 1 Track 134: To 1829, 2 Track 135: To F, 1845 Track 136: To Francis S Osgood Track 137: To Helen Track 138: To Isaac Lea Track 139: To M Track 140: To MLS Track 141: To Margaret Track 142: To Marie Louise Track 143: To Miss Louise Olivia Hunter Track 144: To My Mother Track 145: To Octavia Track 146: To One in Paradise Track 147: To The River Track 148: Ulalume Essays Track 149: A Few Words on Secret Writing Track 150: Eureka: A Prose Poem, Part 1 Track 151: Eureka: A Prose Poem, Part 2 Track 152: Eureka: A Prose Poem, Part 3 Track 153: Eureka: A Prose Poem, Part 4 Track 154: Eureka: A Prose Poem, Part 5 Track 155: Maelzel's Chess Player Track 156: Morning on the Wissahiccon Track 157: The Balloon Hoax Track 158: The Philosophy of Composition Track 159: The Philosophy of Furniture Track 160: The Poetic Priciple Track 161: The Rationale of Verse, Part 1 Track 162: The Rationale of Verse, Part 2 Novels Track 163: The Journal of Julius Rodman, Opening Credits Track 164: Chapter 1 Track 165: Chapter 2 Track 166: Chapter 3 Track 167: Chapter 4 Track 168: Chapter 5 Track 169: Chapter 6 Track 170: The Narrative of Arthur Gordan Pym of Nantucket, Opening Credits Track 171: Chapter 1 Track 172: Chapter 2 Track 173: Chapter 3 Track 174: Chapter 4 Track 175: Chapter 5 Track 176: Chapter 6 Track 177: Chapter 7 Track 178: Chapter 8 Track 179: Chapter 9 Track 180: Chapter 10 Track 181: Chapter 11 Track 182: Chapter 12 Track 183: Chapter 13 Track 184: Chapter 14 Track 185: Chapter 15 Track 186: Chapter 16 Track 187: Chapter 17 Track 188: Chapter 18 Track 189: Chapter 19 Track 190: Chapter 20 Track 191: Chapter 21 Track 192: Chapter 22 Track 193: Chapter 23 Track 194: Chapter 24 Track 195: Chapter 25 Track 196: Chapter 26 Track 197: Note Track 198: Closing Credits

70 people found this helpful

This is fantastic!

This narrator is wonderful. He has a rich, full voice and reads it well. I'm really enjoying listening to it. I haven't listened to the whole thing (it's 60 hours long) but everything I've listened to has been great!

15 people found this helpful

• Overall 2 out of 5 stars
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars
• Story 1 out of 5 stars

• Secretly_A_Skeksis

An Average Man's Thoughts

I could not pay attention to what was happening. Due to the youth problem of not being able to pay attention to one thing for very long I typically listen to a book while; doing chores, working out, or going to sleep. For the life of me I could only keep track of what was happening in each short story if I was using either my full or the majority of my attention. There isn't necessarily a problem with that except that I was getting bored with each story pretty fast. Maybe I just don't have the attention span for 60 hours of short stories which will eventually use the word "ejaculate" because boy did my man Poe have an obsession with it. Of course I enjoyed, The Raven, and A Tell-Tale Heart, we all do. However I thought there would be some other good eerie listens in here, and after 30 some odd hours of life I'll never get back, I found just some disappointment. Not worth it, thank GOD for the audible credits because full price is not worth it. Voice acting was excellent though!

2 people found this helpful

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Edgar Allan Poe

Fresh Reads

Edgar Allan Poe was a writer and a literary critic. He is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and horror.

Short Stories

• A Descent into the Maelström by Edgar Allan Poe
• A Tale of Jerusalem by Edgar Allan Poe
• A Tale of the Ragged Mountains by Edgar Allan Poe
• Four Beasts in One by Edgar Allan Poe
• Hop-Frog by Edgar Allan Poe
• Ligeia by Edgar Allan Poe
• Mesmeric Revelation by Edgar Allan Poe
• MS. Found in a Bottle by Edgar Allan Poe
• Never Bet the Devil Your Head by Edgar Allan Poe
• Some Words with a Mummy by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Angel of the Odd by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Balloon-Hoax by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Gold-Bug by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Man of the Crowd by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Mystery of Marie Roget by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Oblong Box by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Oval Portrait by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Purloined Letter by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Sphinx by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall by Edgar Allan Poe
• Thou Art the Man by Edgar Allan Poe
• Von Kempelen and His Discovery by Edgar Allan Poe
• Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling by Edgar Allan Poe
• A Dream Within a Dream by Edgar Allan Poe
• Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe
• Eldorado by Edgar Allan Poe
• Eulalie – A Song by Edgar Allan Poe
• Sonnet – Silence by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Bells by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
• To Helen by Edgar Allan Poe
• To One in Paradise by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Philosophy of Composition by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Philosophy of Furniture by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Poetic Principle by Edgar Allan Poe
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The Book of Hopes: Words and Pictures to Comfort, Inspire and Entertain Children

Edited by Katherine Rundell, with contributions from more than 100 children’s writers and illustrators

This extraordinary collection of short stories, poems, essays and pictures has contributions from more than 110 children’s writers and illustrators, including Lauren Child, Anthony Horowitz, Greg James and Chris Smith, Michael Morpurgo, Liz Pichon, Axel Scheffler, Francesca Simon and Jacqueline Wilson.

The collection, published by Bloomsbury, is dedicated to the doctors, nurses, carers, porters, cleaners and everyone working in hospitals.

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When schools were closed during the COVID-19 pandemic in both 2020 and 2021 Bloomsbury generously permitted us to share The Book of Hopes as an ebook freely accessible to schools and families.

As part of our Education Recovery support for schools and children we worked with partners to develop a range of supporting resources, that you can find linked below.

The Book of Hopes is now available as a beautiful hardback gift edition, with 23 never-seen-before stories, poems and illustrations, providing an ongoing wealth of discovery, comfort and inspiration for children.

The Book of Hopes is available to buy from all good book retailers. A donation from the sale of each book will go to NHS Charities Together, in gratitude for the incredible efforts of all those who worked in hospitals over the quarantine period. Learn more and purchase your own copy .

Book of Hopes resources for teachers

Reading Tree Challenge

Promote reading for pleasure and share pupils' book recommendations with our Reading Tree Challenge. Cover the bare branches and trunk of your Reading Tree with leaves showcasing all the books your pupils have read.

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Before you start searching for a poem or short story, identify the title or poet you would like to research. If you still need to choose a title or author, first determine the time period or cultural context you are interested in. You can find lots of recommended poems or short stories available from a quick Google search, or try the Works Search in Gale Literature.

Keep in mind, both poems and short stories are often collected into books called anthologies or collected works. These 'collections' are usually selected based on author, time-period, cultural context, or subject matter. In these cases, use a keyword search based on these categories.

Where to Search

To find a collection of poems or short stories, try:

• Search the Library Look for anthologies in print or digital format. Try keywords such as genre, time period, or cultural group.

To find or browse individual poems or short stories, try:

• Literary Reference Source Plus This link opens in a new window 1. Under the 'Document Type' filter, select Poem or Short Story. 2. Search for the author's name using the AUTHOR field to narrow your search.
• Gale Literature This link opens in a new window 1. Use the 'Works Search' to find the title of a work or works by a specific author. 2. Check the box for Full-Text of Work available. 3. Under Type of Work, select the appropriate options.

Also try websites, such as:

• Canadian Poetry Online One of many public sites devoted to helping people find poetry or short stories. Canadian Poetry Online includes a collection of poetry from published contemporary and 19th century Canadian poets. Maintained by the University of Toronto.
• The Poetry Foundation The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience.

Example Poetry Anthologies and Collected Works

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The Best Reviewed Books of 2022: Short Story Collections

Featuring george saunders, ling ma, colin barrett, jamil jan kochai, and more.

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We’ve come to the end of another bountiful literary year, and for all of us review rabbits here at Book Marks, that can mean only one thing: basic math, and lots of it.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be calculating and revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2022, in the categories of (deep breath): Fiction ; Nonfiction ; Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature ; and Literature in Translation .

Today’s installment: Short Story Collections .

1. Bliss Montage by Ling Ma (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

21 Rave • 5 Positive • 2 Mixed Read an interview with Ling Ma here

“The eight wily tales mark the return of an author whose inventive debut, Severance, urgently announced her as a writer worth watching … an assured follow-up, a striking collection that peddles in the uncanny and the surreal, but it often lacks Severance ’s zest. Some stories are confident in their strangeness and ambiguity, a handful feel like promising sketches of sturdier narratives and the rest fall somewhere in between. The connections between them are loose, tethered by similar leads … Wry, peculiar stories like Los Angeles and Yeti Lovemaking confirm that Ma’s imagination operates on the same chimerical frequency as those of Helen Oyeyemi, Samanta Schweblin, Meng Jin. Each of these stories leans un-self-consciously into the speculative, illuminating Ma’s phantasmagoric interests. They are funny, too … Despite their nagging loose ends, Ma’s stories stay with you — evidence of a gifted writer curious about the limits of theoretical possibility. They twist and turn in unpredictable ways and although the ride wasn’t always smooth, I never regretted getting on.”

–Lovia Gyarkye ( The New York Times Book Review )

2. Liberation Day by George Saunders (Random House)

16 Rave • 6 Positive • 5 Mixed (86) Read George Saunders on reading chaotically and the power of generous teachers, here

“Acutely relevant … Let’s bask in this new collection of short stories, which is how many of us first discovered him and where he excels like no other … Saunders’ imaginative capacity is on full display … Liberation Day carries echoes of Saunders’ previous work, but the ideas in this collection are more complex and nuanced, perhaps reflecting the new complexities of this brave new world of ours. The title story is only one of a handful of the nine stories in this collection that show us our collective and personal dilemmas, but in reading the problems so expressed—with compassion and humanity—our spirits are raised and perhaps healed. Part of the Saunders elixir is that we feel more empathetic after reading his work.”

–Scott Laughlin ( The San Francisco Chronicle )

3. Homesickness by Colin Barrett (Grove Press)

16 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an essay by Colin Barrett here

“Its comedy stands in balance to the collection’s more tragic tenor … expands [Barrett’s] range, and though the first took place in the fictional Irish town of Glanbeigh, the books share a fabric shot through with dark humor, pitch-perfect dialogue and a signature freshness that makes life palpable on the page. The language counterpoints the sometimes inarticulate desperation of the working-class characters, and that dissonance lends an emotional complexity to their stories … As a writer, Barrett doesn’t legislate from the top down. His unruly characters surge up with their vitality and their mystery intact. Their stories aren’t shaped by familiar resolutions—no realizations, morals or epiphanies. The absence of a conventional resolution does risk leaving an otherwise charming story like The Silver Coast with the rambling feel of a slice of life. But in the majority of the stories in this book, to reinvent an ending is to reinvent how a story is told, and overall, Homesickness is graced with an original, lingering beauty.”

–Stuart Dybek ( The New York Times Book Review )

4. Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu (Tin House)

13 Rave • 4 Positive Read a story from Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century here

“..the horrors are more intimate, smaller, and less global in scale. This is not a collection filled with fantastic beasts, although a sea monster does make an appearance, but instead illuminates the monstrous nature of humanity … Technology, rather than magic, catalyzes these changes. That is not to say there are not some traces of unexplained fantasy, such as a girl who sprouts wings from her ankles, but mostly, Fu’s monsters manifest from modernity … The success of Kim Fu’s stories is the element of the unexpected. There are surprises lurking in these narratives, whether it is a quick final plot twist or unexpected peculiarity … Although Fu seems more concerned with alienation stemming from individual relationships, there is criticism of conventional consumer capitalism … The characters in Fu’s collection are eccentric and unexpected in their choices, and many of their stories feature unforeseen endings that strike the right tone for the dark era we live in … Fu opens a window looking onto the sad possibilities of our own failures.”

–Ian MacAllen ( The Chicago Review of Books )

5. If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery (MCD)

12 Rave • 4 Positive Read an essay by Jonathan Escoffery here

“Ravishing … The book, about an immigrant family struggling to make ends meet, delights in mocking the trope of an immigrant family struggling to make ends meet … There’s peacocking humor, capers, and passages of shuddering eroticism. The book feels thrillingly free … Escoffery’s protagonists, though resourceful, can’t accomplish the impossible; nor do they sacrifice themselves for the reader’s sentimental education … The prose comes alive … These characters are strange amalgams of limited agency and boundless originality. Their survival, perhaps, comes down to their style … Escoffery deftly renders the disorienting effects of race as they fall, veil-like and hostile, over a world of children … Throughout, the refrain runs like an incantation: What are you? Escoffery, hosing his characters in a stream of fines, bills, and pay stubs, studies the bleak math of self-determination.”

–Katy Waldman ( The New Yorker )

6. The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories by Jamil Jan Kochai (Viking)

12 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed Read Jamil Jan Kochai’s essay, “How Final Fantasy VII Taught Me to Write,” here

“Kochai, an Afghan-American writer, shapes and reshapes his material through a variety of formal techniques, including a fantasy of salvation through video gaming, a darkly surrealist fable of loss, a life story told through a mock résumé, and the story of a man’s transformation into a monkey who becomes a rebel leader…Like Asturias, Kochai is a master conjurer…The collection’s cohesion lies in its thematic exploration of the complexities of contemporary Afghan experience (both in Afghanistan and the United States), and in the recurring family narrative at its core: many of the stories deal with an Afghan family settled in California…Kochai is a thrillingly gifted writer, and this collection is a pleasure to read, filled with stories at once funny and profoundly serious, formally daring, and complex in their apprehension of the contradictory yet overlapping worlds of their characters.”

–Claire Messud ( Harper’s )

7. Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty (Tin House Book)

12 Rave • 1 Positive • 1 Mixed Listen to an interview with Morgan Talty here

“Talty depicts the relationship between David and Paige perfectly—the siblings clearly care for each other; it’s evident beneath the bickering and the long periods when they don’t see each other … The story ends with both mother and son experiencing terrifying medical emergencies; it’s almost excruciating to read, but it’s undeniably powerful, and, in its own way, beautiful … Talty’s prose is flawless throughout; he writes with a straightforward leanness that will likely appeal to admirers of Thom Jones or Denis Johnson. But his style is all his own, as is his immense sense of compassion. Night of the Living Rez is a stunning look at a family navigating their lives through crisis—it’s a shockingly strong debut, sure, but it’s also a masterwork by a major talent.”

–Michael Schaub ( The Star Tribune )

8. How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu (William Morrow)

10 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan Read an excerpt from How High We Go in the Dark here

“If you’re a short-story lover—as I am—you’ll be impressed with Nagamatsu’s meticulous craft. If you crave sustained character and plot arcs, well, you’ll have to settle for admiring the well-honed prose, poignant meditations and unique concepts. Hardly small pleasures … The reader might best approach the book like a melancholy Black Mirror season … This is a lovely though bleak book. Humanity has long turned to humor in our darkest moments, but levity feels absent even in a chapter narrated by a stand-up comedian. That said, the somber tone unifies the disparate characters and story lines … a welcome addition to a growing trend of what we might call the ‘speculative epic’: genre-bending novels that use a wide aperture to tackle large issues like climate change while jumping between characters, timelines and even narrative modes … Nagamatsu squarely hits both the ‘literary’ and ‘science fiction’ targets, offering psychological insights in lyrical prose while seriously exploring speculative conceits … a book of sorrow for the destruction we’re bringing on ourselves. Yet the novel reminds us there’s still hope in human connections, despite our sadness.”

–Lincoln Michel ( The New York Times Book Review )

9. Life Without Children by Roddy Doyle (Viking)

9 Rave •  5 Positive • 1 Mixed

“… a quietly devastating collection of short stories that brilliantly portrays the pervasive sense of hopelessness that immobilised us during the dog days of Covid … Lest he be accused of focusing too much on men and their sense of victimhood, the countervailing magnificence of his women is worth noting. Part of Doyle’s genius resides in a kind of bathetic amusement at the follies of his male characters and always it’s the stoical good sense of women that saves the day … Another of his great strengths is the ability to drop in those little epiphanies that resolve the tension and conflict of a story in a single significant moment … Doyle breaks our free fall into despair by emphasizing the redemptive power of humor, love and the kindness of strangers.”

–Bert Wright ( The Sunday Times )

10. Stories From the Tenants Downstairs by Sidik Fofana (Scribner)

12 Rave Read an interview with Sidik Fofana here

“… outstanding … The brilliance of this debut, however, is that Fofana doesn’t let anyone go unseen … masterfully paints a portrait of the people most impacted by gentrification … Fofana brings his characters to life through their idiosyncratic speech patterns. Auxiliary verbs are dropped, words are misspelled, prepositions are jostled, all to create a sense of vernacular authenticity…Grammar is an instrument that Fofana plays by ear, to much success.”

–Joseph Cassara ( The New York Times Book Review )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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Teachers' Resources

We are grateful to all teachers and professors from around the world who have taken up the challenge of teaching reading, writing, and critical thinking skills to the world's students. Please use the free resources at our website to awaken a life-long passion for literature and learning in your students. Tell your colleagues if you find them helpful. And thank you for choosing to teach!

• Short Stories for Students Recommended stories by grade level: high school, middle school, elementary school, preschool, and English learner idioms.
• Pre-K Wordplay! Toddlers and children in pre-kindergarten have fun and build confidence playing with words. Enjoy this selection of nursery rhymes, counting songs, hink pink riddles, and read-aloud stories to encourage the very earliest readers. We also offer a collection of Yummy Stories .
• Short Stories for Children Classic children's stories, fairytales and folktales with beautiful illustrations, as well as some text exemplars, specifically for pre-k to elementary school. Beatrix Potter, Aesop, Mother Goose, Grimm, Andersen, Kipling, Carroll, Hawthorne, Margery Williams, Ruth Stiles Gannett, Laura E. Richards, Edward Lear, Oscar Wilde, and many more! Great resource for parents.
• Best Fairy Tales by Age Teach Fairy Tales with our recommended stories by age, ideas for lesson plans, discussion questions, and useful links for all grades.
• Chapter Books for Young Readers The Secret Garden, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book, Treasure Island, Little Women, Black Beauty, Treasure Island, and more to inspire independent reading.
• Short Stories for Middle School Students Vol I and Vol II . A wide-range of genres to engage all 6th through 8th grade, up to high school readers.
• Short Stories for High School Students Vol I and Vol II . Note that some of these stories are suitable for college-level course work. If high school students have not read some of the iconic stories on the Middle School list, please consider assigning some for extra credit. We also offer a guide to Russian Writers .
• Study Guides Resource guides by title and genre, designed for MS & HS teachers and students to understand the plot, analyze characters, historic context, literary devices, and meaningful quotes. We offer discussion questions, paired reading and useful links for your lesson plans: Moby-Dick, The Call of the Wild, The Gift of the Magi, The Little Match Girl, The Monkey's Paw, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, The Pit and the Pendulum, Song of Myself, The Story of An Hour, The Lady, or the Tiger? Genres include: Feminist Literature, Dark Romanticism, Transcendentalism, Gothic Literature, and Fairy Tales. More guides coming!

• Useful Idioms A selection of popular idioms and their meaning, for students and English language learners.
• Poetry for the Well-Read Student Fifty great poems for middle school, high school, and beyond... Poetry exemplars to inspire students to enjoy the power of well chosen words. Whitman, Frost, Carroll, Dickinson, Hughes, Emerson, John Donne, Longfellow, Millay, Li Bai, T.S. Eliot, Akhmatova, Browning, Wilde, Teasdale, Coleridge, Shakespeare, and many more. New! American Patriotic Songs
• Children's Poetry Especially selected poems to engage children from pre-k to elementary school, including exemplars and poems your students will enjoy for their whimsy; Dickinson, Browning, Frost, Millay, Lear, Mother Goose, Kipling, Tennyson, Williams, Alcott, Thayer, Lazarus, Richards.
• Haiku Poetry The haiku poems by Matsuo Basho are simply stunning favorites for building literacy skills. His short story, The Aged Mother , is wonderful for older children through adult. Enjoy Basho's beautiful contributions to literature for yourself!

• American History Students will better understand historical context by reading works from authors who were there and shaped events of their day. Lincoln, Jefferson, Franklin, Roosevelt, King, Jr., Stowe, Hughes, Douglass, Stanton, Bierce. Easy-access to the U.S. Constitution, summary of the Amendments, notable historic essays, speeches, persuasive writing exemplars.
• African American Literature Profiles of activist authors who wrote about issues of racial equality and influenced public opinion. Douglass, Northup, King, Jr, Booker T. Wasington, Du Bois, Stowe, Chesnutt, Dunbar-Nelson and more. Relevant historic documents, including reconstruction amendments.
• Books for Young Readers A selection of time-tested classic books that hold a young readers attention and help them build strong reading skills.
• Civil War Stories A collection of short stories, books, essays, letters, poems and speeches about the American Civil War. Crane, Lincoln, Stowe, Ambrose Bierce, Henry James, Whitman, Edward Everett Hale, Alcott, Howe, and Sullivan Ballou. New! Civil War Songs
• World War I Literature A collection of poems, stories, novels capturing the brutal realities of fear and loss during wartime. Interesting propaganda posters students can use as springboards for further research. You might also appreciate Foodie Books & Wartime Recipes

• Biographies for Kids American authors and historical figures have interesting stories of their own; biographies written especially for older children.
• 25 Great American Novels The usual suspects: Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, The Secret Garden, Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter, The Call of the Wild, The Awakening, The Jungle, and many other classics.
• Common Core Text Exemplars We know this is controversial, but we've included public domain literature exemplars we know you may be teaching. Elementary School texts Middle School texts High School texts
• Studies in Classic American Literature D.H. Lawrence's analysis of Moby Dick, The Scarlett Letter, Fenimore Cooper, Poe, Hardy, Melville, Whitman, and Franklin.

• 100 Great Short Stories This is a great resource to inspire students to read a broad range of authors and write their own.
• 75 Short Short Stories Appropriate for middle school and high school students, these stories can be read in five minutes or less, sorted by mood (witty, introspective, morality tales, other-worldly) to engage students in reading, particularly those who might be reluctant to commit to a novel or long story.
• 50 Great Feel-Good Stories Sorted into two sections: one for middle school/high school through adult, the other for elementary children. These stories offer that "good feeling" which makes reading such a joy. Authors include O. Henry, Oscar Wilde, Kathleen Norris, Leo Tolstoy, T.S. Arthur, Bret Harte, Willa Cather, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Anton Chekhov, Stephen Crane, Louisa May Alcott, H.H. Munro (SAKI), James Baldwin, L. Frank Baum, Beatrix Potter, Hans Christian Andersen, Joseph Martin Kronheim, and many more.
• All About The Short Story This is an introductory page that helps students get acquainted with the short story form and find the answers to some commonly asked questions; what's the definition of a short story, how long is a good short story, how are short stories different from poems and novels, where can I find examples of good short stories? A helpful self-study quiz for students will be added shortly.
• Elementary School Reading If you are teaching kindergarten through 5th grade (K-5), you will find age-appropriate reading in the Children's Library , where we feature great stories for kids to read, as well as great stories to read out loud to children. Pre-K and beginner readers will enjoy exploring Pre-K Wordplay! Stronger readers might try to read a selection from Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories . There is also an illustrated section devoted to Aesop's Fables . Kindergarten and first-grade teachers, visit Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes .

• The Bard: William Shakespeare Don't forget Shakespeare! This is a collection of Shakespeare plays and sonnets.

• Features Page This page highlights more resources at the site, inlcuding historical documents, a collection of African-American literature, a listing of women authors, poetry, essays, fairy-tales, and more.
• Literature & History Literature, culture, and history are inextricably tied together. Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin may have hastened the arrival of the American Civil War, and Thoreau's essay On Civil Disobedience informed Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and continues to influence culture today. We offer a collection of important historical works to help you bring landmark documents like The Gettysburg Adress into your classroom instruction and discussions. Enjoy American History .

I want to build a section here, with links that will help teachers to become better teachers, find ways to inspire their students and spark the joy of reading in them. I will seed this section with some links that I have found inspiring and helpful. Please email suggestions to me using the email address toward the bottom of this page.

If you see this text it is because you are not registered. Please Create an Account and indicate that you are a teacher when you create your profile.

The Catcher in the Rye is not public domain material, so I cannot host it at this site, but many of you will teach it during your career. As you plan for you class and teach the material, I hope you will find this work, by teacher Shaun L. Kelly to be inspirational and helpful to you and your students: Growing Old With Holden

Rob Velella is an independent scholar of American Literature. He maintains The American Literary Blog and holds an MA in English & Publishing. He is passionate about literary history and his extensive knowledge is on display at his blog. I include him here as a potential resource that can be booked to come to your school or classroom to provide a living history performance. His most popular dramatic personae are Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

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The Best Reviewed Essay Collections of 2021

Featuring joan didion, rachel kushner, hanif abdurraqib, ann patchett, jenny diski, and more.

Well, friends, another grim and grueling plague year is drawing to a close, and that can mean only one thing: it’s time to put on our Book Marks stats hats and tabulate the best reviewed books of the past twelve months.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2021, in the categories of (deep breath): Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections ; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature; Literature in Translation; General Fiction; and General Nonfiction.

Today’s installment: Essay Collections .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. These Precious Days by Ann Patchett (Harper)

21 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed Read Ann Patchett on creating the work space you need, here

“… excellent … Patchett has a talent for friendship and celebrates many of those friends here. She writes with pure love for her mother, and with humor and some good-natured exasperation at Karl, who is such a great character he warrants a book of his own. Patchett’s account of his feigned offer to buy a woman’s newly adopted baby when she expresses unwarranted doubts is priceless … The days that Patchett refers to are precious indeed, but her writing is anything but. She describes deftly, with a line or a look, and I considered the absence of paragraphs freighted with adjectives to be a mercy. I don’t care about the hue of the sky or the shade of the couch. That’s not writing; it’s decorating. Or hiding. Patchett’s heart, smarts and 40 years of craft create an economy that delivers her perfectly understated stories emotionally whole. Her writing style is most gloriously her own.”

–Alex Witchel ( The New York Times Book Review )

2. Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion (Knopf)

14 Rave • 12 Positive • 6 Mixed Read an excerpt from Let Me Tell You What I Mean here

“In five decades’ worth of essays, reportage and criticism, Didion has documented the charade implicit in how things are, in a first-person, observational style that is not sacrosanct but common-sensical. Seeing as a way of extrapolating hypocrisy, disingenuousness and doubt, she’ll notice the hydrangeas are plastic and mention it once, in passing, sorting the scene. Her gaze, like a sentry on the page, permanently trained on what is being disguised … The essays in Let Me Tell You What I Mean are at once funny and touching, roving and no-nonsense. They are about humiliation and about notions of rightness … Didion’s pen is like a periscope onto the creative mind—and, as this collection demonstrates, it always has been. These essays offer a direct line to what’s in the offing.”

–Durga Chew-Bose ( The New York Times Book Review )

3. Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Viking)

12 Rave • 13 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Orwell’s Roses here

“… on its simplest level, a tribute by one fine essayist of the political left to another of an earlier generation. But as with any of Solnit’s books, such a description would be reductive: the great pleasure of reading her is spending time with her mind, its digressions and juxtapositions, its unexpected connections. Only a few contemporary writers have the ability to start almost anywhere and lead the reader on paths that, while apparently meandering, compel unfailingly and feel, by the end, cosmically connected … Somehow, Solnit’s references to Ross Gay, Michael Pollan, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Peter Coyote (to name but a few) feel perfectly at home in the narrative; just as later chapters about an eighteenth-century portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds and a visit to the heart of the Colombian rose-growing industry seem inevitable and indispensable … The book provides a captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker … And, movingly, she takes the time to find the traces of Orwell the gardener and lover of beauty in his political novels, and in his insistence on the value and pleasure of things .”

–Claire Messud ( Harper’s )

4. Girlhood by Melissa Febos (Bloomsbury)

16 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Girlhood here

“Every once in a while, a book comes along that feels so definitive, so necessary, that not only do you want to tell everyone to read it now, but you also find yourself wanting to go back in time and tell your younger self that you will one day get to read something that will make your life make sense. Melissa Febos’s fierce nonfiction collection, Girlhood , might just be that book. Febos is one of our most passionate and profound essayists … Girlhood …offers us exquisite, ferocious language for embracing self-pleasure and self-love. It’s a book that women will wish they had when they were younger, and that they’ll rejoice in having now … Febos is a balletic memoirist whose capacious gaze can take in so many seemingly disparate things and unfurl them in a graceful, cohesive way … Intellectual and erotic, engaging and empowering[.]”

–Michelle Hart ( Oprah Daily )

5. Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told by Jenny Diski (Bloomsbury)

14 Rave • 7 Positive

“[Diski’s] reputation as an original, witty and cant-free thinker on the way we live now should be given a significant boost. Her prose is elegant and amused, as if to counter her native melancholia and includes frequent dips into memorable images … Like the ideal artist Henry James conjured up, on whom nothing is lost, Diski notices everything that comes her way … She is discerning about serious topics (madness and death) as well as less fraught material, such as fashion … in truth Diski’s first-person voice is like no other, selectively intimate but not overbearingly egotistic, like, say, Norman Mailer’s. It bears some resemblance to Joan Didion’s, if Didion were less skittish and insistently stylish and generated more warmth. What they have in common is their innate skepticism and the way they ask questions that wouldn’t occur to anyone else … Suffice it to say that our culture, enmeshed as it is in carefully arranged snapshots of real life, needs Jenny Diski, who, by her own admission, ‘never owned a camera, never taken one on holiday.’” It is all but impossible not to warm up to a writer who observes herself so keenly … I, in turn, wish there were more people around who thought like Diski. The world would be a more generous, less shallow and infinitely more intriguing place.”

–Daphne Merkin ( The New York Times Book Review )

6. The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 by Rachel Kushner (Scribner)

12 Rave • 7 Positive Listen to an interview with Rachel Kushner here

“Whether she’s writing about Jeff Koons, prison abolition or a Palestinian refugee camp in Jerusalem, [Kushner’s] interested in appearances, and in the deeper currents a surface detail might betray … Her writing is magnetised by outlaw sensibility, hard lives lived at a slant, art made in conditions of ferment and unrest, though she rarely serves a platter that isn’t style-mag ready … She makes a pretty convincing case for a political dimension to Jeff Koons’s vacuities and mirrored surfaces, engages repeatedly with the Italian avant garde and writes best of all about an artist friend whose death undoes a spell of nihilism … It’s not just that Kushner is looking back on the distant city of youth; more that she’s the sole survivor of a wild crowd done down by prison, drugs, untimely death … What she remembers is a whole world, but does the act of immortalising it in language also drain it of its power,’neon, in pink, red, and warm white, bleeding into the fog’? She’s mining a rich seam of specificity, her writing charged by the dangers she ran up against. And then there’s the frank pleasure of her sentences, often shorn of definite articles or odd words, so they rev and bucket along … That New Journalism style, live hard and keep your eyes open, has long since given way to the millennial cult of the personal essay, with its performance of pain, its earnest display of wounds received and lessons learned. But Kushner brings it all flooding back. Even if I’m skeptical of its dazzle, I’m glad to taste something this sharp, this smart.”

–Olivia Laing ( The Guardian )

7. The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century by Amia Srinivasan (FSG)

12 Rave • 7 Positive • 5 Mixed • 1 Pan

“[A] quietly dazzling new essay collection … This is, needless to say, fraught terrain, and Srinivasan treads it with determination and skill … These essays are works of both criticism and imagination. Srinivasan refuses to resort to straw men; she will lay out even the most specious argument clearly and carefully, demonstrating its emotional power, even if her ultimate intention is to dismantle it … This, then, is a book that explicitly addresses intersectionality, even if Srinivasan is dissatisfied with the common—and reductive—understanding of the term … Srinivasan has written a compassionate book. She has also written a challenging one … Srinivasan proposes the kind of education enacted in this brilliant, rigorous book. She coaxes our imaginations out of the well-worn grooves of the existing order.”

–Jennifer Szalai ( The New York Times )

8. A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House)

13 Rave • 4 Positive Listen to an interview with Hanif Abdurraqib here

“[A] wide, deep, and discerning inquest into the Beauty of Blackness as enacted on stages and screens, in unanimity and discord, on public airwaves and in intimate spaces … has brought to pop criticism and cultural history not just a poet’s lyricism and imagery but also a scholar’s rigor, a novelist’s sense of character and place, and a punk-rocker’s impulse to dislodge conventional wisdom from its moorings until something shakes loose and is exposed to audiences too lethargic to think or even react differently … Abdurraqib cherishes this power to enlarge oneself within or beyond real or imagined restrictions … Abdurraqib reminds readers of the massive viewing audience’s shock and awe over seeing one of the world’s biggest pop icons appearing midfield at this least radical of American rituals … Something about the seemingly insatiable hunger Abdurraqib shows for cultural transaction, paradoxical mischief, and Beauty in Blackness tells me he’ll get to such matters soon enough.”

–Gene Seymour ( Bookforum )

9. On Animals by Susan Orlean (Avid Reader Press)

11 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed Listen to an interview with Susan Orlean here

“I very much enjoyed Orlean’s perspective in these original, perceptive, and clever essays showcasing the sometimes strange, sometimes sick, sometimes tender relationships between people and animals … whether Orlean is writing about one couple’s quest to find their lost dog, the lives of working donkeys of the Fez medina in Morocco, or a man who rescues lions (and happily allows even full grown males to gently chew his head), her pages are crammed with quirky characters, telling details, and flabbergasting facts … Readers will find these pages full of astonishments … Orlean excels as a reporter…Such thorough reporting made me long for updates on some of these stories … But even this criticism only testifies to the delight of each of the urbane and vivid stories in this collection. Even though Orlean claims the animals she writes about remain enigmas, she makes us care about their fates. Readers will continue to think about these dogs and donkeys, tigers and lions, chickens and pigeons long after we close the book’s covers. I hope most of them are still well.”

–Sy Montgomery ( The Boston Globe )

10. Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache from the American South  by Margaret Renkl (Milkweed Editions)

9 Rave • 5 Positive Read Margaret Renkl on finding ideas everywhere, here

“Renkl’s sense of joyful belonging to the South, a region too often dismissed on both coasts in crude stereotypes and bad jokes, co-exists with her intense desire for Southerners who face prejudice or poverty finally to be embraced and supported … Renkl at her most tender and most fierce … Renkl’s gift, just as it was in her first book Late Migrations , is to make fascinating for others what is closest to her heart … Any initial sense of emotional whiplash faded as as I proceeded across the six sections and realized that the book is largely organized around one concept, that of fair and loving treatment for all—regardless of race, class, sex, gender or species … What rises in me after reading her essays is Lewis’ famous urging to get in good trouble to make the world fairer and better. Many people in the South are doing just that—and through her beautiful writing, Renkl is among them.”

–Barbara J. King ( NPR )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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Scrivener for essayists, short story writers and poets

Scrivener: perfect for writing collections

Scrivener is not just for novelists. I write short stories and poems, and use Scrivener for my stock of this material, including a record of what’s been published and where.

The best template for collections of material?

This provides a great 3-level structure within the Manuscript folder:

• Part folder
• Chapter folder
• Scene document

And you can rename the Parts, Chapters and Scene titles to suit your own requirements. This is how mine looks for my collection of poems.

I started publishing my poetry before I discovered Scrivener, so I had to pull in my stock of poems and then record details of what had already been published, and where.

From here on, in this article, where I refer to my poetry, this could just as easily be your poems, your stories, your articles, your essays. This strategy works for all such material. I have one Scrivener project for poetry, and a second Scrivener project for short stories.

Import and split

If, currently, all your poems are in a single Word document, it’s easy to pull them into Scrivener using Import and Split.

First, insert a hashmark (or octothorpe!) ahead of the text that you want to form your document title. This takes a while, but saves effort in the long run.

I highlighted my ‘Stock of Poems’ folder in the Binder and selected File/ Import / Import and Split …

When prompted, I identified the Word document I’d prepared with its hashmarks and was delighted to see that the footnotes I’d written in Word transferred to the Inspector footnotes.

These footnotes remind me, for each poem, what inspired me to write it, when that happened and details of the poem’s progress toward publication.

If your poems are scattered, involving many different sources, the process will be slower, but worth the effort in the long run.

If you need to copy and paste text, especially from Word, remember to use Paste and Match Style ; otherwise, your manuscript will be a mess of unwanted formatting commands – none of which you can see, but they will drive you mad eventually.

And don’t worry about inserting the poems in alphabetical order on title; let Scrivener do that for you!

Sorting poems into alphabetical order by title

My poems were in alphabetical order by title in the original Word document. If yours are not and you’d like them to appear in alphabetical order, Scrivener can sort them for you.

Highlight the folder; mine is called Stock of poems. Select Edit / Sort / Ascending (A-Z).

Creating a collection

Having my complete stock of poems within a single folder is great. However, I also want to see what I published as collections. That’s why I set up a folder for each collection within the Published collections folder.

Scrivener’s Copy To feature is perfect for this task. Highlight the document for the poem. Right click and follow the route Copy To / Manuscript / Published collections / Because I must. Scrivener creates a copy of that poem’s document within the collection. Magic!

When I’m ready to create another collection, the process will be straightforward.

• Set up a new folder for the collection (in the Published collection folder) and give it a title for publication purposes.
• Copy the poems from my stock into that collection.

Publishing a collection

You could use Scrivener just to keep track of your material. It’s good to have everything in one place? Or you could go one step further and use this single project file to publish more collections.

Even though your Binder will have much more information than you want to include in a single collection, you can use File / Compile to publish whichever poems you want to include this time around.

It’s not quite as simple as that. If you select material within the Manuscript folder and try to compile, Scrivener knows this is not your entire manuscript and, while it will export as directed, the options for front matter are greyed out and the icon for an ebook cover is not visible.

So, you need to follow this procedure:

• Create a new folder in Manuscript – I’ve called mine ‘My Poetry’.
• Drag all that you’ve set up so far into that folder.
• Use the Move Left to upgrade that folder so it is the same level as Manuscript. If you don’t already have this icon in your menu, customise your icons to pull it into place. This blog post explains how.

• Copy whatever you want to publish this time into the Manuscript folder. File / compile will then play ball!

Remember to strip out any comments in the material you want to Compile. They will remain in the original material but you won’t want to share this with your ebook readers!

Once you’ve published, the folder you set for the Compile can be dragged to the Published collections folder, leaving the Manuscript folder empty and ready for your next collection.

Formatting an ebook poetry collection

This is how a couple of pages from my ebook looks with no tweaking, just using Scrivener’s default settings.

There is no point changing the font style or the font size; the reader controls these. The only change I might make is to start each new poem on a new page. Easily done: tweak the section type setting so there is a page break before the text of each poem. Learn all about section types here !

Questions? Need a helping hand? Want a demo?

To watch me demonstrating the various Scrivener features mentioned in this blogpost or to ask any questions about the features that serve poets, short story writers – and so on –  so well, book a Simply Scrivener Special .

To help me to prepare, you could also complete this short questionnaire .

The ScrivenerVirgin blog is a journey of discovery: a step-by-step exploration of how Scrivener can change how a writer writes. To subscribe to this blog, click  here .

Also … check out the Scrivener Tips on my  ScrivenerVirgin Facebook page .

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Short on time? 10 books you can finish quickly.

The book world staff rounds up some of their favorite books that come in under 200 pages.

Sometimes, even those of us who read for a living are happy to pick up a book that we can finish in just a few days — or maybe even in a lazy afternoon at the park. We’re pretty sure that’s true for everyone else, too, so the Book World staff rounded up some of our favorite titles — new and old, fiction and nonfiction — that come and go as quickly as Washington’s brief spring. Here you’ll find memoirs and novels alike. Our only rule is that everything had to come in under 200 pages — sometimes a lot shorter.

‘Look at Me,’ by Anita Brookner

A surprising number of my favorite books hover around the 200-page mark, and some of these are indisputable classics (“Mrs. Dalloway,” “Notes From Underground,” “The Great Gatsby,” “The Good Soldier”). What’s most remarkable is how much these books can get done in a relatively small space, constraint seeming to paradoxically increase breadth and ambition. In “ Look at Me ” (1983), Anita Brookner’s third novel, a research librarian named Frances Hinton narrates the story of how she entered the social orbit of a shiny, charming married couple and their friend. Like many of Brookner’s characters, Frances lives a stringent, lonely life that seems a combination of consciously, even proudly, chosen and temperamentally inevitable. Not much happens in the book by way of plot, and not much has to. This is one of the most beautifully written and psychologically penetrating novels you’ll find. (192 pages) — John Williams

‘Waiting for the Barbarians,’ by J.M. Coetzee

In “ Waiting for the Barbarians ” (1980), Nobel Prize-winning South African writer J.M. Coetzee pulls off an eventful trick, writing about his home country’s political sins (and political sins more generally) through an allegory about an unspecified “Empire.” Narrated by a magistrate in the hinterlands, the plot revolves around the capture and treatment of “barbarians” who oppose the Empire. Often disturbing, the book is a condensed epic, vividly written and philosophically provocative on nearly all its relatively few pages. (152 pages) — John Williams

‘The Dry Heart,’ by Natalia Ginzburg (96 pages)

“ The Dry Heart ” (1947), a sleek and startling novella by postwar Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, is a sort of feminist answer to Albert Camus’s “The Stranger.” His book begins, famously, “Mother died today.” Ginzburg’s even more arresting opening is at once flatly matter-of-fact and feverishly wrathful. “I shot him between the eyes,” she writes on the book’s very first page. “He” is the narrator’s decidedly underwhelming husband, a philandering loafer who marries her out of boredom and refuses to terminate a years-long affair with another woman.

Ginzburg is a crisp stylist, and her unsentimental and disciplined prose is curiously at odds with her novella’s guiding sentiment: fury that simmers until, all at once, it boils over. “The Dry Heart” is as taut and methodical a record of rage and revenge as you are apt to find. (96 pages) — Becca Rothfeld

‘Spurious,’ by Lars Iyer

People are often drawn to short novels because of some unspoken promise of elegance and perfectionism. Such books are marketed to readers as marvels of precision, darling little objects. (Yes, there’s something mildly orthorexic about what Esquire called the rise of the “slim volume.” ) Lars Iyer’s “ Spurious ” (2011), though, is foul-mouthed, high-spirited, rough around the edges. Nothing much happens in it: Two best frenemies tool around England and, in the words of the author , “take the mickey” out of each other. I’m told it’s a “philosophical novel” — Lars and his friend W, like the author, work in academia and bemoan their intellectual limitations — but don’t blanch! It’s also way more entertaining than it has any right to be. Iyer makes you believe in insult comedy as an Olympic sport, even a form of love. And if you like this one, it’s a gateway to five more in a similar vein. The perfect tonic for anyone haunted by the thought that they ought to be reading something better, more rigorous, more wholesome. (190 pages) — Sophia Nguyen

‘Where Reasons End,’ by Yiyun Li

Written after the suicide of Yiyun Li’s son, this novel from 2019 is largely composed of conversations between a bereaved mother and her dead child, Nikolai. They muse over various intellectual matters — the nature of time, the proper usage of language — and needle each other. (At one point, he tells her, “If you’re protesting by becoming a bad writer, I would say it’s highly unnecessary,” to which she retorts, “Dying is highly unnecessary too.”) It’s a tough book to widely recommend, purely because of the heaviness of its subject matter. But “ Where Reasons End ” is also unforgettable, the kind of book that feels like a miracle of physics: You’re amazed by how lightly the prose moves, despite the density of its emotional core. (192 pages) — Sophia Nguyen

‘The Minotaur at Calle Lanza,’ by Zito Madu

Throughout the first year of the covid pandemic, my girlfriend and I mainlined season after season of the genial PBS travel program “Rick Steves’ Europe,” seeking a habitable elsewhere in its images of crowded market squares and ornate palazzos. Nigerian American writer Zito Madu’s experience of the era was altogether different, thanks to an artist’s residency that brought him to Venice in the fall of 2020, a time when the city had been largely emptied out, especially of the tourists who normally drift along its canals.

In this memoir published earlier this year, that evacuated milieu becomes an occasion for Madu’s elegant meditations on alienation, especially from his own family, but also from the overwhelmingly White world he moves through. His prose has the smooth and constant warmth of blood in a vein, a fluidity so steady it sometimes seems no different from stillness. Though Madu’s narrative culminates in a shockingly surreal sequence that is unlike anything I have read in a memoir, I will remember “ The Minotaur at Calle Lanza ” for its calmer moments: an African priest’s service in an otherwise Italian Catholic church or the quiet labor of a glass blower, a man content to carry on his business in silence “as if you weren’t there.” (184 pages) — Jacob Brogan

‘The Spinning Heart,’ by Donal Ryan

A portrait of a rural Irish town decimated by economic collapse, Donal Ryan’s debut novel made a splash when it was published in 2012, winning the Irish Book Award for both newcomer of the year and book of the year. Each of the 21 short chapters in “ The Spinning Heart ” is told from the perspective of a different inhabitant, their lives woven together by economic uncertainty and marred by tragedy. Bobby Mahon, a construction company foreman, blames himself after owner Pokey Burke skipped town, putting the livelihoods of his workers at risk. And Pokey’s father, Joseph Burke, is ashamed of his son, who appears to have fleeced the laborers to save himself. As the residents’ stories unfold, their public personas shield inner monologues that expose the truth about what they think of each other and of themselves. (156 pages) — Becky Meloan

‘About Alice,’ by Calvin Trillin

The author photo on the back of Calvin Trillin’s 2006 memoir about his wife, Alice, may be the happiest I’ve ever seen. It’s from their wedding day in 1965. Neither seems dressed for the occasion, but they are beaming. That joy radiates through “ About Alice ,” adapted from a New Yorker article, which should be sad because it is essentially about Alice’s death, on Sept. 11, 2001 (not in the terrorist attacks but in a hospital a few miles away, of heart failure stemming from lung cancer treatment).

Here the longtime New Yorker writer who for years had turned his wife into a favorite character in his books and articles aims to set the record straight about her. She was wise, yes, but not a stern “dietician in sensible shoes.”Rather, “she had something close to a child’s sense of wonderment. She was the only adult I ever knew who might respond to encountering a deer on a forest path by saying, ‘Wowsers!’” By the end of this brief, witty and loving portrait, you’ll wish you’d met Alice, too, if only to hear that exclamation. (78 pages) — Nora Krug

‘The Island of Dr. Moreau,’ by H.G. Wells

There are several late 19th-century novellas — among them, Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Wells’s “The Time Machine,” James’s “The Turn of the Screw” and Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” — that strikingly anticipate the anxieties and obsessions of our modern world. All four are rightly celebrated, but I now find a fifth, H.G. Wells’s “ The Island of Dr. Moreau ” (1896), the most disturbing and prophetic of all.

Why? Because it probes real-life issues that haunt us more than ever: What makes us human? Are we really that different from other animals? What is the relationship between science and morality? In particular, Wells asks us to think hard about the ethics and consequences of experimentation and what we now call genetic engineering.

Not least, “The Island of Dr. Moreau” embeds all these questions in a perfectly orchestrated crescendo of mystery, terror, violence, sacrifice and spiritual desolation. You will never forget it. “Are we not men?” (160 pages) — Michael Dirda

‘Another Brooklyn,’ by Jacqueline Woodson

With the economy of a poet, Jacqueline Woodson packs so much life and pain into her National Book Award-winning novel, “ Another Brooklyn .” When it was published in 2016, it was a return of sorts; Woodson had been focusing her creative efforts on books for young readers, to critical acclaim, and this was her first novel for adults in nearly two decades. The story, though, revolves around a child: August is 8 years old when she moves from Tennessee to New York with her brother and father after her mother’s death. Her fragmented recollections of 1970s Brooklyn — related years later after she becomes an anthropologist — work on multiple frequencies, capturing a child’s partial understanding of the dangers around her and the electric thrill of new friendships while also conveying nostalgia for the relationships that couldn’t withstand time and the innocence that was lost too soon. (192 pages) — Stephanie Merry

More from Book World

Love everything about books? Make sure to subscribe to our Book Club newsletter , where Ron Charles guides you through the literary news of the week.

Best books of 2023: See our picks for the 10 best books of 2023 or dive into the staff picks that Book World writers and editors treasured in 2023. Check out the complete lists of 50 notable works for fiction and the top 50 nonfiction books of last year.

Find your favorite genre: Three new memoirs tell stories of struggle and resilience, while five recent historical novels offer a window into other times. Audiobooks more your thing? We’ve got you covered there, too . If you’re looking for what’s new, we have a list of our most anticipated books of 2024 . And here are 10 noteworthy new titles that you might want to consider picking up this April.

Still need more reading inspiration? Super readers share their tips on how to finish more books . Or let poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib explain why he stays in Ohio . You can also check out reviews of the latest in fiction and nonfiction .