LitReading - Short Stories and Timeless Tales

This story is a small masterpiece of exasperation from 1905. Ellis Parker Butler wrote "Pigs Is Pigs" as a jab at corporate red tape, and somehow, more than a hundred years on, it has only gotten funnier. Two guinea pigs arrive at a railway express office. A clerk named Mike Flannery decides they are pigs, the customer insists they are pets, and a single nickel of disagreement sets off a cascade of letters, departments, and, well, arithmetic. You’ll see.Ellis Parker Butler, 1869 to 1937, was one of America’s most prolific humorists, an Iowa-born writer who turned out thousands of stories, essays, and poems across a long career. He published more than thirty books, helped found the Authors’ League of America, and wrote for nearly every major magazine of his day. Yet it was a single short story, "Pigs Is Pigs," dashed off in 1905, that made his name. It sold in the hundreds of thousands, inspired stage and screen adaptations, and quietly seeded a whole comic tradition of small creatures multiplying beyond all reason, a lineage that runs straight through to the tribbles of Star Trek. Not bad for two guinea pigs and a stubborn clerk.This is a episode from our archives recently remastered.

Frank Norris could grind a man down to nothing in three hundred naturalist pages. He could also, when the rent was due, write something this loose and this funny. "Two Hearts That Beat as One" sends two soldiers of fortune, one American, one English, gunrunning down the Pacific coast, where they make the oldest mistake there is and fall for the same woman. The cure they settle on is a boxing match. It does not cure them.Frank Norris was thirty-two when he died, in 1902, which is the kind of fact that stops you cold, because by then he’d already written McTeague and The Octopus, the big grinding novels they still hand out on syllabi. But he wrote lighter things too, and the Three Black Crows were his rowdiest invention, three guns-for-hire who turn up in four different stories getting into trouble on land, at sea, and once or twice somewhere stranger. This was their first time out. It was collected after his death, in a book called A Deal in Wheat, in 1903.This is a episode from our archives recently remastered.

The note comes on heavy paper from somewhere in Bohemia, unsigned, promising a visitor who will not show his face. He turns out to be very large, very rich, and in a great deal of trouble. Somewhere in a small house in St. John’s Wood there is a photograph. Five attempts to take it have failed.Holmes has three days, a wardrobe full of other men, and Watson, newly married and glad of the excuse, back at his side for an evening of breaking the law in a good cause.The first Sherlock Holmes short story, from The Strand Magazine, 1891. Read by Don McDonald.

As a boy he was teased for his tenderness. He kept birds, rabbits, a dog, a small monkey. And a cat, enormous and entirely black, who followed him from room to room and would have followed him into the street. Now he sits in a cell with a pen, determined to set the record down plainly. He is not mad, he tells us. He is not dreaming. Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 tale.WARNING: Contains graphic animal and human violence.Follow and each new story will show up in your library as soon as it's released. No searching, no remembering.This show is one corner of Short Storyverses, a family of fiction podcasts. Some lean literary. Some are funny. Some will keep you up with the lights on, and some belong by the fire in December. There are classics nobody reads anymore and should, and original stories you won't hear anywhere else. They're all read by Don McDonald from his studio booth, and all short enough to finish on a drive, a walk, or a sleepless night.Come explore at shortstoryverses.com. Pick a universe. Stay a while.

Ed Loyce spends his days fixing radios and televisions in a small town where nothing much happens. One evening he climbs out of his basement workroom, walks into the square, and sees something no decent town would put up with.Then he notices how everyone else is taking it.Philip K. Dick wrote "The Hanging Stranger" in 1953, a year when plenty of Americans had started keeping an eye on their neighbors. Seventy years on, it still makes you check who's standing behind you.Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and spent most of his life in California, writing fast, living broke, and asking one question in more than forty novels and over a hundred short stories: what's real? He won the Hugo Award for The Man in the High Castle in 1963, yet for most of his life he was paid like a pulp writer and read like a cult figure. He died in March 1982, a few months before Blade Runner, adapted from his Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, reached theaters. After that the rest of the world caught up. Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and The Man in the High Castle all came from his pages. The paranoia turned out to be prophecy.If you want more stories like this one, and plenty that are nothing like it, they're all waiting for you at shortstoryverses.com. Go have a look around. Just don't stand under any lampposts on the way there.

There’s a reason crows gather in cemeteries. They remember. They watch. And sometimes, they wait. Murder of Crows isn’t a tale borrowed from the past—it’s one I wrote for New Tales Told, a series of original stories that echo in the spaces between memory and myth. This one lingers in the cold silence of the American frontier, where the shadows are long and the watchers have wings.Set in Montana Territory, 1868, Murder of Crows is a western—but not the kind you remember from Saturday matinees. The dead don’t rest. The land doesn’t forget. And the crows? They remember everything.Author's NoteThere’s an old belief that crows remember faces. That they mourn their dead. That they never forget a slight.It was early morning when a murder of crows descended on the sycamore outside my bedroom window, their cries so sharp and relentless they pulled me from sleep with a strange sense of dread. I lay there, half-conscious and irritated, staring at the ceiling as their screams echoed through the glass. And in that moment—quietly, almost reflexively—I had a thought I wasn’t proud of: Maybe this murder deserves one of its own.From that flash of anger came something unexpected: a story. Murder of Crows began as a whisper of guilt and folklore. Though it draws faint inspiration from the life and legend of Jeremiah Johnson, this tale is entirely imagined—fiction through and through. But like many stories, its roots are tangled in real emotion: grief, memory, regret… and the uncanny way the natural world sometimes stares back.As for the birds? They haven’t left.They’re still watching.Just outside my window.