LitReading - Classic Short Stories and Timeless Tales

A man in a country pub insists his story is true. It concerns his brother Wilfred, a chemist of some genius, a jolly outdoor girl with a wholesome sunburn, and a Yorkshire baronet who spells his name with four small f's. Somebody is being kept behind a locked door on the second floor. Somebody else is about to regret asking what's true to life. This is P.G. Wodehouse, 1926, at his most gleefully unreliable. First published in Liberty , August 7, 1926; collected in Meet Mr. Mulliner , 1927. Read by Don McDonald. HumorUs is part of the Short Storyverses network. shortstoryverses.com This is a story from the archives recently remastered. We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks. Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

An obituary arrives in the mail, folded in thirds, no note, no return address, and the creases are sharp enough to cut with. Roy Kittleson has not seen the man named in it since a Friday in 1986, and he has his reasons, and none of them are good. He drives up anyway. Three hours, most of it flat. He has rehearsed nothing. He is counting on grief to arrive on its own. “The Wrong Funeral,” is an original story written and read by Don McDonald from ShortStoryverses.com . We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks. Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Here is the first episode of a new Short Storyverses limited series podcast, Care Protocol . Nobody has died on a Portland street in four years. The city handed over the wheel eight years ago and got back quiet nights, clean air, and a fatality rate of zero. Ask anyone. The algorithms saved us. Then, at 7:12 on an ordinary Tuesday, a man waiting for his morning ride is killed against a brick wall at Fifth and Glisan—in front of three witnesses who all describe the same impossible thing. Before lunch, there is a second. The company’s lawyers called the police seven minutes after the first death. That was six minutes before anyone called them. Special Agent Maya Restrepo catches the case: deaths that could not have happened, and a maintenance log with a sentence sitting in it where a number should be. You’re hearing Episode One of Care Protocol as a special LitReading bonus. The story continues on its own separate podcast, and future episodes will not appear in the LitReading feed. Search for and follow Care Protocol wherever you get your podcasts. In Episode Two of Care Protocol : Something happens on a stretch of I-5 outside Wilsonville, caught from nine angles. By Friday morning, there isn’t a screen in the country that hasn’t run it. By Saturday, the country has decided what it means—and Maya Restrepo is the only person still asking the other question. Episode Two arrives Wednesday, September 16, exclusively in the Care Protocol podcast feed. Explore our multiverse of narrated short stories at ShortStoryVerses.com . We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks. Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Garden was finished before anyone in it was born. The rain arrives on schedule, in the amount that has been decided. The manual has never been improved on. Nobody touches anybody. Children learn it early, with the short rod, because correcting is cheapest when they're small. Sela is twenty-two and has never had a low year. When the tremor takes the hands of the old man who grades pears beside her, she stands up and says, "I'll take that." Nothing forbids it. There is even a provision. Two hundred and nine times. Over twenty months. Somebody is keeping the number. “The Garden’s Wall” started with a question I couldn’t put down. What would a society look like if it decided, sincerely and on the evidence, that compassion was a defect to be bred out? Not a cruel place. A reasonable one, where the punishment is measured, the reasoning is sound, and nobody enjoys any part of it. The answer turned out to be a garden, and a wall nobody built, and a gate that opens outward, and forty-one people put through it in a single lifetime. Please check out my many universes of short stories at shortstoryverses.com and my long-running money podcast, Talking Real Money . We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks. Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A December afternoon, a fire going down, and a marriage stalled halfway through a quarrel nobody bothered to finish. Egbert comes in for tea prepared to be reasonable, then conciliatory, then almost penitent. Lady Anne, rigid in the armchair by the tea table, declines to participate. Somewhere above them a bullfinch works through the only tune it knows, and on the rug a Persian cat named Don Tarquinio waits with the patience of an animal who has already decided something. Saki at his most precise: eleven minutes of drawing-room comedy built entirely out of one person not speaking, and a closing line that reorganizes everything you just heard. "The Reticence of Lady Anne" was collected in Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches (1910). Read by Don McDonald. Litreading is part of Short Storyverses. shortstoryverses.com We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks. Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Poker Flat is a mining camp that has recently decided to take its virtue seriously. When the town's new moral committee finishes its business, four of its most familiar faces find themselves traveling a mountain trail with strangers who know far too much about one another's pasts. Among them is a gambler whose quiet confidence suggests he has already calculated every card that has not yet been dealt. Bret Harte's classic American story unfolds where the Sierra Nevada meets the law of unexpected consequences. In the company of strangers, with old judgments left behind in the valley below, the outcasts of Poker Flat discover that the line between sinner and saint is rarely where the town's respectable citizens believe it to be. A timeless tale about the hands we are dealt, the hands we play, and the surprising hands we never see coming. We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks. Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is not a story. After dozens of episodes, I thought I'd take one to explain myself. Who I am, why LitReading exists, how a story earns a place here, and why there are suddenly so many related shows sharing the same shelf. Also a few honest words about advertising, a tip jar I'd rather call Buy Me a Book, a request for a review, and a listener who found my narration unlistenable. Don's Money podcast is Talking Real Money We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks. Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Arnold Thorndike buys a Correggio before breakfast and can price his own time to the minute. Two hundred dollars of it. So when he stops his car at the Court of General Sessions to say a word for a young stenographer who got drunk, lost five hundred dollars of his employer's money, and is due up for sentence, he figures the errand will run him about a thousand. The court has other ideas. Richard Harding Davis, the most famous reporter of his generation, sets the Wisest Man in Wall Street down on a hard oak chair and leaves him there, unrecognized and unimportant, admitted only because he's "with Mr. Andrews," while the whole sorry parade of the city files past the bench. This is a comedy of manners with a soft heart. If you enjoy well-narrated short stories, check out our many story-telling podcasts at shortstoryverses.com We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks. Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

High summer, and it is too hot to sing. A huntsman walks a road with a gun on his shoulder, a bird in his bag, and a dog running ahead of him. A woman steps out of the rye with a sickle in her hand and says his name. She is delighted to see him. He is not. They sit down between two fir trees, and in the ten minutes that follow, Anton Chekhov does something very quiet and very cruel. He was twenty-five, writing fast and for money under a pen name, and he claimed later that he wrote this one in a bathhouse in a single sitting We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks. Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This story is the first story specifically written for HumorUs Stories, a funny story podcast from ShortStoryverses.com . In Maple Glen, nothing ever happens. This week, nothing happens in three separate backyards, after dark, and everyone involved would prefer you didn't ask. A deadpan comedy about honesty, neighbors, and one very patient dog. Find more stories at ShortStoryverses.com — a multiverse of audio fiction spanning seven shows: classics on LitReading, original voices on New Tales Told, children's stories on Readastorus, holiday tales on Season's Readings, horror on FRIGHTLY!, romance on Love Lit, and comedy on HumorUs. Every story sized to fit a commute, a walk, or the quiet stretch before sleep. We have stories buried everywhere. We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks. Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nora has come up to Lake Sabbath to do one hard, practical thing — close the old family house for good, and mark what will be sold. She means to stay a single night. But a house keeps its own memory: the key still on its nail, the drawer that sticks, a boat with a name. And a long, unhurried summer evening on still water can ask more of a person than they came prepared to answer. Short Storyverses is our multiverse of audio fiction — where each show spins in its own orbit but shares one sky. Classics and originals on LitReading, suspense on FRIGHTLY!, romance on Love Lit, comedy on HumorUs, new voices on New Tales Told, and tales for the youngest listeners too. Short enough for a commute, a walk, or the quiet before sleep. Press play at shortstoryverses.com . We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks. Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Atop Orange Mountain, in Mr. Jacobus's summer boarding house, a bored married couple finds relief from their tiresome fellow guests in the arrival of the Bredes — a graceful, good-looking young pair who seem, in every visible way, to be "nice people." But their charming small talk keeps springing leaks. Henry Cuyler Bunner (1855–1896) was a poet, novelist, and the longtime editor of the humor magazine *Puck*, celebrated for polished short stories that find real feeling inside social comedy. "The Nice People" is one of his warmest — a story about gossip, appearances, and the whole hidden other side of people that we never see from the heights of our own self-esteem. We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks. Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The critics call Jerome Wilmer a wizard. They say he doesn't paint faces — he paints hopes, fears, and longings, and that no secret survives sitting for one of his portraits. Home from Paris for his annual New England summer, Wilmer has spent ten years asking Mary Brinsley the same question and getting the same gentle answer. This year, he sets up a canvas in the barn and asks her fiancé to sit instead. Alice Brown's "The Wizard's Touch" (1906) is a quiet story about love, rivalry, and what a portrait really shows — the person you are, or the person you might become. Carefully selected and beautifully narrated by Don McDonald, LitReading brings classic literature back to life — read out loud the way it was meant to be heard. New stories every week. About the author: Alice Brown (1857–1948) was born on a farm in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, and became one of New England's most admired writers of her era. After moving to Boston in 1884, she produced nearly a book a year for five decades — novels, plays, poetry, and the "local color" stories of New England village life that made her reputation, including the collections Meadow-Grass (1896) and The Country Road (1906). "The Wizard's Touch" was published in 1906, at the height of her career. Enjoyed today's story? Follow or subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode, and if you have a moment, a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify helps other listeners discover the show. Explore our complete catalog of classic short stories and original tales at shortstoryverses.com. LitReading is written, produced, and narrated by Don McDonald. "The Wizard's Touch" by Alice Brown is in the public domain. We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks. Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Here is a special bonus episode for your summer listening pleasure. A sweltering summer afternoon on the Louisiana coast, a storm racing in off the Gulf, and a woman alone in her house when an old flame rides up the path for shelter. Kate Chopin wrote "The Storm" in 1898 and then did something telling with it, she put it in a drawer, because she knew no editor of her day would print a story that rendered a woman's desire so frankly and then refused to punish anyone for it. It stayed unseen until 1969, more than sixty years after her death. Today it stands as one of the boldest short stories in American literature, a small, perfect thing about passion, nature, and the space between what we owe and what we want. Kate Chopin (1850–1904) was born in St. Louis and married into Louisiana Creole society, and after her husband's death she turned to writing, drawing on the Cajun and Creole world she had lived among. Her 1899 novel, "The Awakening," was so unflinching about a woman's inner and sexual life that the backlash all but ended her career in her lifetime. Vindication came slowly and completely, and she is now regarded as a foundational voice in American fiction and an early, fearless chronicler of women's desire and independence. We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks. Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A perfect summer morning, a lawn being readied for the most delightful garden party of the season, and a death just down the hill that no one quite knows what to do with. Katherine Mansfield’s 1922 masterpiece follows young Laura Sheridan as the giddy pleasures of her family’s wealth, a hat, a band, trays of lilies, run headlong into the reality of a working man killed in the lane below. Tender, ironic, and quietly devastating, “The Garden Party” is one of the great short stories of the twentieth century, and it ends on a sentence Laura cannot finish. “The Garden Party” was written by Katherine Mansfield and first published in 1922. If this reading stayed with you, please share Litreading with a fellow lover of fine stories and leave a five-star rating or review, it’s the simplest way to help the work reach new listeners. Discover our multiverse of short stories at shortstoryverses.com. Thanks for listening. We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks. Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Another perfect Summer Story from Litreading. A sailor given up for drowned walks back through his own shop door, three years gone, with a fresh scar and a long story about shipwreck, islands, and rescue. His wife weeps with joy. His mother-in-law only sniffs. And across town an old fortune-teller waits with a little china bowl and a great deal to say about where the man has really been. "The Castaway" is W.W. Jacobs at his lightest, a small seaside comedy of belief, suspicion, and a homecoming that goes nowhere near the way anyone planned. The truth here is a slippery thing, and the teller may not be the one you expect. W.W. Jacobs (1863 to 1943) was an English writer best known today for the horror classic "The Monkey's Paw," though in his own time he was celebrated mostly for comic stories, many of them set among sailors, dock workers, and the small coastal towns they came home to. "The Castaway" shows that lighter, sharper side, the wit that made him a popular favorite long before a single cursed wish made him famous. Litreading is part of Short Storyverses , a network of fiction podcasts gathering the strange, the funny, and the quietly unsettling, all of it read aloud. Find every show and every story at shortstoryverses.com. We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks. Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to our first special summer story of 2026. A May storm rolls over a Russian village, and a small beggar-girl runs through it looking for Terenty the cobbler. Her brother has jammed his hand in a hollow tree, reaching after a cuckoo's egg. What begins as a rescue becomes a long, wandering walk through fields washed clean by rain, a barefoot old man naming every living thing for a boy who cannot hear enough of it. There's no real plot here, and that's the point. Chekhov gives us weather, wonder, and the quiet ache of a child who has no home to walk back to. The last image, offered to no one but the moon, may stay with you longer than the storm. Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) was a Russian short-story writer and playwright, and a working doctor besides. He wrote hundreds of stories that changed what the form could do, trading tidy plots and clear morals for mood, restraint, and the quiet weight of ordinary life. "Medicine is my lawful wife," he once said, "and literature is my mistress." He died of tuberculosis at forty-four, having reshaped both the short story and the modern stage. If you enjoyed this story, check out all of our short story podcasts on the Short Storyvesrse channel on Apple Podcasts or at shortstoryverses.com We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks. Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A woman alone in a decaying house. A town that watches her for fifty years, pitying, judging, whispering, and never once truly seeing her. And one room upstairs that no one has opened in forty years. Faulkner published it in 1930 and it just entered the public domain. This is a story that loses none of its grip on the second telling, or the tenth. And you may have caught it: there's no rose anywhere in the story. Faulkner said the title was a salute, a flower handed to a woman whose tragedy could never be undone. The town watched her for fifty years and gave her nothing. The rose is Faulkner's, laid down after she's gone, the way roses usually are. We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks. Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

An original story, written and read by me, Don McDonald. This one began with something I read and couldn't shake. The universe is expanding, and it won't stop, and the stars are spending the only fuel there is. The brightest burn out first. The small, dim, patient ones hold on the longest, for trillions of years, until at last the final star flickers out and the dark that follows has no end and no dawn. I found I couldn't stop thinking about that last light, and about who might be there to watch it die. Less the physics of the thing than the ache underneath it, one witness at the end of everything, keeping a watch that has finally run out of anything to keep. That became Dark . We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks. Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On a bright Sunday afternoon in a French public garden, a lonely English teacher lifts her treasured fox fur from its box, settles onto her usual bench, and quietly borrows the lives going on around her. Katherine Mansfield's "Miss Brill," first published in 1920, is a small marvel, barely two thousand words that somehow hold an entire life up to the light. The band plays, the season has begun, the crowd parades, and Miss Brill, watching, decides she too has a part in the great Sunday performance. It is warm and observant and quietly shattering, modernist storytelling at its most humane, and it ends on a single image you won't soon shake. Read by Don McDonald. Katherine Mansfield was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1888, and spent most of her short adult life in England and on the Continent, restless, often ill, and always writing. She is remembered now as one of the great modernists of the short story, a writer who could fit an entire life inside a few pages and turn it slowly in the light. Virginia Woolf, not a generous judge of her contemporaries, once confessed that Mansfield's was the only writing she had ever been jealous of. Mansfield died in France in 1923, of tuberculosis, just thirty-four years old, with most of her finest work behind her and, you can't help feeling, a great deal more still ahead. Litreading is part of Short Storyverses ( shortstoryverses.com ), a multiverse of audio fiction devoted to exceptional storytelling, classics and originals alike. Explore Readastorus for timeless tales for the youngest listeners, Season's Readings to brighten your holidays any time of year, Love Lit for the romantics and the hopelessly devoted, and FRIGHTLY! for tales that keep the lights low and the floorboards creaking. Search for all of them wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoy historical fiction, be sure to check out Don's first novel, The Line Uncrossed available at Amazon.com . We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks. Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.