Free summaries
Short Stories — page 4
259 public-domain short stories books, summarised. Page 4 of 6.
The Queer Folk of Fife: Tales from the Kingdom
David Pryde
These gentle, observant stories capture a bygone era in the Scottish Kingdom of Fife, where rural traditions, rigid morality, and quiet human eccentricities shaped the lives of townspeople and farmers alike.
The black cat, vol. I, no. 6, March 1896
Various
This collection of short stories from 1896 offers a glimpse into the late nineteenth-century appetite for mystery, social satire, and domestic intrigue. It presents a world of eccentric legacies, haunted cottages, and inventive solutions to modern life.
Through Welsh Doorways
Jeannette Augustus Marks
In the quiet villages of rural Wales, the smallest doorways hold the heaviest secrets, where life, death, and the weight of tradition press upon the hearts of the humble.
A Little Book of Christmas
John Kendrick Bangs
A collection of four gentle, interconnected tales, this volume explores the transformative power of kindness during the Christmas season. It captures the spirit of early twentieth-century New York through stories of compassion, charity, and unexpected connection.
Bush studies
Barbara Baynton
Wind-swept stations, boiling billies, and watchful dogs shadow an unforgiving landscape where loyalty is rare currency and silence masks catastrophe under an indifferent sky.
Kafir Stories: Seven Short Stories
W. C. (William Charles) Scully
Crossing cultural frontiers in late nineteenth-century South Africa, these seven tales lay bare the collisions of human greed, tribal custom, and imperial authority.
The Race of the Swift
Edwin Carlile Litsey
The natural world serves as a brutal, unforgiving stage where survival is the only law and every creature is either a predator or prey. This collection of linked wilderness tales captures the relentless cycle of life, death, and territorial struggle among the inhabitants of a Kentucky knob-land.
Civilization: Tales of the Orient
Ellen N. (Ellen Newbold) La Motte
Under a thin veneer of imperial progress, white settlers and local elites across East Asia trade their dignity and humanity for petty status and transient power.
The Black Creek Stopping-House, and Other Stories
Nellie L. McClung
A collection of sketches capturing the rhythm and spirit of the Canadian prairie frontier, where the vast, unforgiving landscape acts as both a trial and a catalyst for human kindness.
In the Village of Viger
Duncan Campbell Scott
The quiet rhythms of a rural community hide profound currents of longing, grief, and secret hope within these interconnected portraits of village life.
Words for the Wise
T. S. (Timothy Shay) Arthur
This collection of moral tales serves as a mirror for the nineteenth-century American conscience, illustrating how small personal choices ripple outward into life-altering consequences. It is a straightforward, didactic exploration of integrity, vanity, and the heavy costs of living without self-reflection.
Green Thursday
Julia Peterkin
A vivid, atmospheric portrait of life in a sequestered South Carolina plantation, where the ancient rhythms of nature and the heavy, unyielding traditions of a rural community define the struggles of its black inhabitants.
The Praying Skipper, and Other Stories
Ralph Delahaye Paine
This collection of short stories captures the raw, salt-sprayed reality of the American merchant marine and the inner lives of men facing the vast, indifferent power of the sea.
Masquerades
Shane Leslie
HOOK This collection of short stories explores the thin, often haunting veil between the mundane world and the inexplicable, where hidden obsessions and spectral encounters shatter the routine of everyday life.
Clorinda Walks in Heaven
A. E. (Alfred Edgar) Coppard
A quiet, unsparing vision of English rural life, where ordinary people grapple with stark passions, eccentric yearnings, and sudden tragedy.
Look on the sunny side
Ruth Lamb
Every cloud has a silver lining when viewed through faith, as ordinary homes find extraordinary grace amid daily trials, domestic sorrow, and quiet perseverance.
The willow weaver, and seven other tales
Michael Wood
In a world where unseen spiritual forces cross paths with human frailty, ordinary lives become instruments for mystical song and sudden redemption.
From the four winds
John Galsworthy
The world is a precarious place where the line between salvation and ruin is often no thicker than a heartbeat. In these fragmented, intense tales, the human spirit is pushed to its absolute limit by love, greed, and the crushing weight of fate.
Captain Kettle on the war-path
C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
Captain Sir Owen Kettle, a firebrand veteran with a wooden leg and a penchant for composing hymns, returns to the fray to outmaneuver German U-boats and saboteurs during the First World War.
Miss Bracegirdle and others
Stacy Aumonier
A quiet, conventional life in a sleepy cathedral town serves as the launching pad for a series of harrowing and unexpected encounters across Europe. Through these stories, the mundane boundaries of duty and propriety are tested by the sudden intrusion of the macabre, the criminal, and the deeply human.
Angels' Shoes, and Other Stories
Marjorie L. C. (Marjorie Lowry Christie) Pickthall
A quiet, luminous world of northern wilderness, sudden human devotion, and silent myth unfolds along the margins of rivers and snow-bound trails.
Night Court
Norman Arkawy
An ordinary night at a grotesque public spectacle reveals a chilling judicial system where gleeful spectators eventually become the next victims.
Shades of Davy Crockett
Theodore Pratt
Davy Crockett returns to a world obsessed with his legend, seeking to understand the impact of his legacy.
A mirror of Shalott
Robert Hugh Benson
Seven Catholic priests and a layman gather in a Rome presbytery to share uncanny, unsettling tales of the preternatural, probing the fragile border between the material world and the unseen.
Wolf Pass
William Byron Mowery
Defying her Mountie husband, a city-born bride walks straight into the clutches of a desperate fugitive deep in the northern wilderness.
The devil in a nunnery, and other mediaeval tales
Francis Oscar Mann
A vivid tapestry of the Middle Ages, these tales capture the collision of earthly desires with the stern, often terrifying weight of faith. They reveal a world where the sacred and the profane dance in constant, uneasy rhythm.
Three at Table: The Lady of the Barge and Others, Part 12
W. W. (William Wymark) Jacobs
A lost traveler seeks shelter in a remote, darkened house, only to find himself sharing a mysterious meal with two reclusive hosts. This unsettling encounter forces a confrontation with the true nature of fear and human isolation.
Cream of the jug
Unknown
An anthology of American humor from the mid-1920s, this collection gathers short, character-driven yarns that capture the quirks, social anxieties, and vernacular wit of a bygone era.
Interference and Other Football Stories
Harold M. (Harold Morrow) Sherman
The game of football is more than a contest of muscle; it is a crucible where character, loyalty, and nerves are tested against the backdrop of collegiate pride. This collection of short stories captures the high-stakes drama of the gridiron, exploring the internal and external pressures faced by young athletes…
Buckin' the air
Bud La Mar
Two rambunctious cowboys find that trading their horses for a rickety airplane leads to a chaotic, gravity-defying escape from the law. This high-flying Western caper turns a simple trip to a rodeo into a slapstick odyssey of destruction.
Clean crazy
W. C. (Wilbur C.) Tuttle
A simple desire for a refreshing swim turns into a chaotic, cactus-filled ordeal for two ranch hands. This farcical Western tale proves that sometimes the hardest path to cleanliness is the one that leads to the most trouble.
In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II: Christmas Tales from 'Round the World
Unknown
The warmth of the season serves as a hearth for these gathered tales, where ghosts, goblins, and children navigate the thin veil between the mundane world and the mysteries of the human heart.
Trifles for the Christmas Holidays
Henry S. Armstrong
The holiday season serves as a veil for both domestic joy and the sharp edges of human ambition, revealing how quickly festive warmth can collide with the cold realities of social climbing, hidden pasts, and criminal desperation.
Heathen Master Filcsik
Kálmán Mikszáth
A stubborn, isolated cobbler clings to a threadbare, embroidered fur cloak as the only object of his affection, until a final, silent encounter with his dying daughter forces a transformation that defies his reputation.
The princess and the tiger
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A peaceful morning at an ancestral estate is shattered by the sudden, terrifying arrival of escaped wild animals. This narrative explores the tension between human order and the raw, unpredictable power of the natural world.
Cupid and the law
Rae Soares
This collection of short stories captures the social friction, illicit trade, and romantic entanglements of life in early 20th-century Hawaii and beyond. It serves as a window into a world where rigid laws meet the fluid, often desperate, desires of people caught between tradition and new horizons.
A trip to Plutopia
E. (Emanuel) Haldeman-Julius
Plutopia is a chillingly efficient industrial satire depicting a society bifurcated into a mass of numbered, calorie-deprived laborers and a tiny, detached elite of masters. It serves as a stark, cautionary exploration of dehumanization through absolute economic control.
Because he listened in
W. C. (Wilbur C.) Tuttle
The "Laramie Kid," a down-on-his-luck outlaw, overhears a conspiracy to rob a gold-laden stagecoach. He attempts to beat the conspirators to the prize, only to find that life, unlike fiction, rarely follows a predictable script.
The coast guardsman
W. E. Carlton
A junior surfman fights to clear his name against a treacherous rival and a skeptical commander on the foggy, smuggling-prone shores of Cape Cod.
Dangerous Dilemmas: Startling but True
James Anderson Peddie
This collection of tales offers a window into the precarious lives of gamblers, opportunists, and Victorian-era adventurers. These accounts of social deception, high-stakes betting, and curious coincidences capture the frantic energy of a world constantly on the edge of ruin.
Mountain killers
Thomas Barclay Thomson
A man waits in the high mountains to exact lethal revenge, only to find that nature has set a violent trap for both the hunter and the hunted.
Cows is cows
W. C. (Wilbur C.) Tuttle
When a Bible-spouting sower on a yellow burro and a laconic cow-country sheriff collide with fake detectives and petty brand-blinds, Montana justice gets wonderfully chaotic.
The Sad Shepherd: A Christmas Story
Henry Van Dyke
Stripped of his wealth and his illusions, a disillusioned courtier wanders through a desolate Judean landscape toward an unexpected dawn.
Edna's Sacrifice and Other Stories
Frances Henshaw Baden
A collection of Victorian tales explores the quiet heartbreaks of sacrifice, romantic misunderstandings, and the subtle domestic choices that shape a lifetime.
Stories and Sketches
Harriet S. (Harriet Sophia) Caswell
A quiet, steady gaze at nineteenth-century North American life, where faith and grit measure the distance between survival and despair.
In doors and out
Oliver Optic
A collection of sharp-edged, mid-19th-century moral tales, these stories examine the domestic and professional anxieties of an era caught between traditional values and the dizzying pressures of a rapidly modernizing society.
The romance of Captain Duffy
H. De Vere (Henry De Vere) Stacpoole
The story follows a rugged, self-made sailor who finds himself the sole companion of a shipwrecked young woman on a remote Pacific island, leading to an unlikely and fleeting romantic bond.
A divided heart, and other stories
Paul Heyse
Two people can inhabit the same house, share the same bed, and yet live on different sides of an unbridgeable emotional chasm.