Eight free classic short stories
Great fiction you can read or download now and talk about later in a group chat on Jansplaining
Wish you had more time to read great fiction?
I’d love to help. Once I have an epoxy grip on the Substack tech, I’ll be starting a discussion group on Jansplaining about classic short stories you can read in an hour or so. Each month we’ll talk about one or two timeless crowd-pleasers that are among the greatest stories ever written.
In the meantime, here are eight you might like. At the end of each story, I’ve linked to a non-paywalled online edition you can read for free.
‘Hills Like White Elephants’ by Ernest Hemingway
“Hills Like White Elephants” isn’t just one of Ernest Hemingway’s greatest short stories. It’s one of the best by any writer about a lover’s gaslighting.
In this case, an American man tries to persuade his pregnant girlfriend to have an abortion she doesn’t want. They’re waiting for a train at a station in Spain, the most Catholic country in Europe, which he knows—or should know—would make it harder for the woman to agree to his wish.
The man presses his case in a brief story that consists mainly of dialogue and never mentions the word “abortion.” One key to understanding its rich symbolism is to remember the meaning of “white elephant” in American slang: something you no longer need or value and that, in the past, might have been sent off casually to a “white elephant” sale sponsored by a church group or parent-teacher association.
Read “Hills Like White Elephants” for free here.
‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson
“The Lottery” is a story a lot of people think they know: a grim tale of a small town that annually stones to death a resident chosen in a random drawing.
If you think you understand it, consider: Why is the victim is a woman? Why do men draw from the box? Why do wives stand beside their husbands during this macabre process?
Reread “The Lottery” with those questions in mind, and you’re likely see it afresh.
Read “The Lottery” for free here.
‘Sonny’s Blues’ by James Baldwin
One of James Baldwin’s finest stories expertly weaves together several themes: the cruelties of the Jim Crow era, the redemptive power of music, the importance of the blues in African American culture, and siblings’ need for each other in adulthood.
In Harlem in the 1950s, a black algebra teacher tries to come to terms with the heroin addiction, imprisonment, and recovery of his brother, Sonny. A breakthrough comes when he hears Sonny play at a jazz club, and as he begins to see his brother’s gifts, he also understands more about himself.
Read “Sonny’s Blues” for free here.
‘The Lady With the Dog’ by Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov stands at the headwaters of the modern short story. For generations, he’s profoundly influenced other writers, including Nobel laureates like Ernest Hemingway and Alice Munro.
But where do you start with an author who wrote hundreds of stories? Try “The Lady With the Dog” (a title translators have also rendered as “The Lady With the Pet Dog” and “The Lady With the Little Dog”). This 1899 story is one of Chekhov’s best-loved and most widely anthologized.
A disaffected 40-year-old Russian man is vacationing in Yalta when he meets and begins an affair with Anna, “the lady with the dog,” who revives his zest for life. Both are married, and when they return to the cities in which they live, neither can give up the romance. They face “intolerable bonds” in their present situations but also vast obstacles to living together. Chekhov leaves open the question of how — if at all — they can move forward in an unforgiving society.
Read “The Lady With the Dog” for free here.
‘Roman Fever’ by Edith Wharton
“Roman Fever” is a tonic for anyone frustrated by New Yorker stories that leave you thinking, “What was that about?”
One of Edith Wharton’s most popular stories, it involves “two American ladies of ripe but well-cared-for middle age” whose surface gentility masks a ruthless competition that resurfaces when they meet on vacation in Rome. There, years earlier, one of them had committed a shocking betrayal of their longstanding friendship.
“Roman Fever” is about a malign form of female jealousy. But it’s also about other worthy themes, including the allure of Rome and how a change of scene can throw into higher relief emotions that have stayed dormant elsewhere.
Read “Roman Fever” for free here.
‘Babylon Revisited’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The plot of “Babylon Revisited” unfolds in the year after the 1929 stock market crash, and no American short story may better show its impact on well-off Americans.
Many tales of financial hardship focus on desperately impoverished families like the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath. Or they involve a bad economy that plays an incidental role in a story that is, at heart, about something else. In “Babylon Revisited,” the crash is the story.
Charlie Wales, an American living in Prague, lost the fortune he made during his hard-drinking life in Paris in the 1920s. With it, he lost custody of his young daughter, Honoria. Having beaten his drinking problems and recovered financially, Charlie travels to Paris, hoping to regain custody of his child from his wife’s sister and her husband.
Fans of “Babylon Revisited” often reduce it to a bedraggled cliché: a story about “second chances.” But it raises a larger question than whether Charlie will have another shot at living with his daughter. It also asks: What’s best for the child?
Read “Babylon Revisited” for free here.
‘A Telephone Call’ by Dorothy Parker
Suppose you wanted to explain to a much younger friend what dating felt like back in that Paleozoic era when women were expected to wait for men to take the initiative. How could you explain the absurdity of it all?
You might recommend Dorothy Parker’s “A Telephone Call,” a tragicomic interior monologue by a woman who waits for a call that never comes.
Parker sets the tone in the first line: “Please, God, let him telephone me now.” It grows more desperate as the phone fails to ring.
Critics tend to see this 1930s story as a tale of female obsession and anguished infatuation. But the speaker’s state of mind is partly socially constructed. It’s rooted in the passive role Parker’s era imposed on women.
That reality invests the story with a theme as bleak as it is entertaining: If the speaker’s obsession resembles a mental illness, it’s one brought on by an irrational double standard. You can read the subtext of “A Telephone Call” as: Social rules can make women sick.
Read “A Telephone Call” for free here.
‘A Christmas Memory’ by Truman Capote
Most of us, if we are lucky, know in childhood the love and friendship of an adult who remains an irreplaceable part of us after he or she dies.
Truman Capote evokes such a bond in this tender story of a boy and an elderly female cousin. She lives with Buddy and their kin in a Southern country town until his exile to a military school separates them.
The penniless woman’s selfless devotion finds expression partly in her tradition of saving up all year to buy the ingredients for the holiday fruitcakes she bakes for Buddy and others—Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Baptist missionaries in Borneo who spoke in town last winter. Even the most ardent fruitcake despisers may shed a tear when illness and old age rob her of the ability to arise on a November morning and exclaim, “It’s fruitcake weather!”
First published in Mademoiselle, “A Christmas Memory” speaks to all ages, and you’ll find the full text in children’s books as well as in editions for adults and online.
Read “A Christmas Memory” for free here.
© 2024 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
It's been a while since I read Capote's A Christmas Story but I wonder if it has been dramatized. I can see it becoming a holiday staple.