A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell them to read the story. – Flannery O’Connor
“The Damned Thing” by Ambrose Bierce
“The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne
“In the Penal Colony” by Franz Kafka
“The Rocking-Horse Winner” by D.H. Lawrence
“The Necklace” by Guy de Maupassant
“Bartleby the Scrivener” by Herman Melville
“The Cop and the Anthem” by O. Henry
“The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe
“A Haunted House” by Virginia Woolf
Unless otherwise noted, all texts are from Project Gutenberg
I welcome suggestions for stories to include in this anthology. Please send your ideas to northwoods63@hotmail.com. Stories must be in the public domain. “Bartleby” was so long that I almost left it off the list, so consider that around the maximum length. And of course in keeping with O’Connor’s observation, every word must be included. So no excerpts.
Credits:
Painting by Jean Beraud