LitReading - Short Stories and Timeless Tales

Ransie and Ariela Bilbro come down out of the Cumberland Mountains to have their marriage undone. Justice of the Peace Benaja Widdup can find no law on the subject, so he invents one, and prices it at five dollars, which happens to be every cent Ransie made on his furs. Then Ariela wants alimony. What follows is a night ride, a masked man, a bill rolled tight and pushed down a rifle barrel, and a decree that nobody much wants by morning. O. Henry watches a single five-dollar bill travel in a perfect circle, and two stubborn people get carried around with it. A love story for anyone who ever meant it when they said they were leaving.This is a episode from our archives recently remastered.

Please note: "A Chance of Death" is the inaugural episode of my new podcast, New Tales Told. I published it here first to share it with my large Litreading audience. However, it will eventually only be available on New Tales Told. If you haven't yet done so, please search for New Tales Told on this podcast service or visit shortstoryverses.com to listen to this and my other original stories.Publishing this story has been one of the scarier things I’ve done in my life. Reading the works of others is far different than narrating a creation of my own. Honestly, I haven’t written fiction since high school—but I’ve always wanted to. I hope to share more, depending on how this one lands.While this story is purely fictional, it unfolds in the shadow of a real disaster—one that affected communities close to my own family in Asheville, where my mother, sister, and niece live. I want to express my sincere concern and empathy for those who were impacted. That said, this is not a story about the tragedy itself. It’s a tale of personal escape, buried secrets, and a woman who may have used chaos as cover for something darker—or perhaps something justified. The events are imagined, but the setting was chosen for its emotional weight, and I’ve tried to treat that weight with care.If you'd like to share your thoughts or get periodic updates, please visit Litreading.com

Mark Twain had a bone to pick with the Sunday-school storybook — that pious little genre where good children are showered with rewards and bad children are struck by lightning, broken by apple trees, and buried under weeping relatives by the final page. So he wrote two stories to set the record straight.In this paired episode we run both, back-to-back, framed like an old-time radio hour. First, The Story of the Good Little Boy: meet Jacob Blivens, who obeys his parents, learns his book, never plays hooky, and longs above all else to be printed in a Sunday-school book of his own — funeral illustration and all. There is only one small problem. The world has not read the same books Jacob has, and it declines, spectacularly, to cooperate.Then, in counterpoint, The Story of the Bad Little Boy: meet Jim — not "James," though the books would prefer it — who steals the jam, robs the orchard, frames the good boy, boats on Sunday without drowning, and grows up to prosper by every kind of rascality. His luck, like Jacob's misfortune, never quite runs out.Twain's targets are sentimentality, easy moralizing, and the comfortable lie that the universe keeps a fair ledger. Told with a wink and a warm lamp, this is satire that still lands a century and a half on. Be good if it suits you. Be careful regardless.This is a episode from our archives recently remastered.

O. Henry usually saves his surprises for the last line. This time he starts with one: the narrator is a dog. In The Memoirs of a Yellow Dog, a mangy, good-natured mutt gives us his candid review of apartment life, married humans, and the fine art of knowing when it's time to go. Wry, tender, and very funny — it's a small classic told from just below the dinner table.Few writers could make a stray dog sound this much like a philosopher. O. Henry's yellow dog sees his humans clearly, loves them anyway, and still knows a good exit when he smells one. It's humor with a soft heart underneath.This is a episode from our archives recently remastered.

Eph Deacon sells pies for a living, or rather his wife bakes them and he carries the basket, which suits his philosophy just fine. Then Phineas Doolittle starts undercutting him from across the river, and what begins as a squabble on a bridge turns into something much bigger, and much sillier. Before long the two men have talked themselves into buying up farms, bakeries, and even a railroad, all in the name of cornering the pie market once and for all. Ellis Parker Butler, the man who gave the world "Pigs Is Pigs," turns small-town rivalry into an empire of hot air, one slice at a time.Ellis Parker Butler was an Iowa-born humorist who wrote more than two thousand stories, essays, and poems over a career spanning four decades, though he never quite escaped the shadow of his most famous creation, "Pigs Is Pigs." Published in 1904, "The Great American Pie Company" shows off the same gift for watching ordinary ambition curdle into absurdity, set against the folksy backdrop of a small Midwestern town not unlike the one Butler grew up in.This is a episode from our archives recently remastered.

Eli has spent thirty years a mile under Lead, South Dakota, in an old gold mine turned physics lab, catching neutrinos, the ghost particles that pass through everything. On an ordinary Tuesday he's alone on a rubber raft inside the Well, a steel tank lined with eleven thousand golden sensors, when the water lights up. Up top, the whole world felt something. Below, the cage has stopped. And the only instrument on Earth that saw it is his.An original story written and read by Don McDonald.If you enjoy short fiction, please follow Litreading.If you like the story, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify

He only wants to open an account. That's all. Fifty-six dollars, a polite request, and maybe two minutes of a bank manager's time. But the moment our narrator steps inside the building, something happens to his brain, and every word that comes out of his mouth makes the situation worse. Stephen Leacock built an entire career on watching ordinary people crumble under ordinary pressure, and few pieces do it faster, or funnier, than this one.Stephen Leacock was a Canadian economist, political scientist, and, by wide agreement, the funniest English-speaking writer of the early twentieth century, with Mark Twain among those who said so. Drawing on his own academic training, Leacock had a particular gift for turning institutions, banks, universities, small towns, into stages for quiet human panic, and "My Financial Career," first published in 1910, remains one of the sharpest few minutes of comic writing he ever produced.This is a episode from our archives recently remastered.

Henry Adams has one dollar to his name, a coat gone thin at the elbows, and a hunger that's stopped being polite about it. Then two rich old brothers hand him an envelope and vanish for thirty days, leaving him holding the single strangest piece of paper in London. It isn't counterfeit. It isn't a joke. And it is worth more than Henry can spend, prove, or even safely admit to owning. Mark Twain turns a penniless clerk loose on Victorian high society and lets the absurdity do exactly what it wants.Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, remains one of America's sharpest satirists, a writer who could turn a tall tale into a mirror held up to an entire society. Published in 1893, "The £1,000,000 Bank-Note" takes his gift for skewering wealth and appearances and sets it loose on Victorian London, decades before Hollywood borrowed the premise more than once.This is a episode from our archives recently remastered.

Out in the Nevada mining camps of the 1870s, men learned to speak a language all their own, part slang, part swagger, part pure invention, and woe to the outsider who couldn't keep up. When a rough-hewn miner named Scotty Briggs marches into town to fetch a proper burial for a fallen friend, he finds himself face to face with a young, freshly minted clergyman who speaks only the King's English, and neither man has the faintest idea what the other is talking about. What follows is one of Mark Twain's funniest, and strangely most tender, character sketches, a collision of two American dialects, two worlds, and two men who, despite everything, manage to understand each other where it counts.Before he was Mark Twain, he was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, a Missouri riverboat pilot who traded the Mississippi for the Nevada silver fields and, when the mining didn't pan out, picked up a pen instead of a pickaxe. He spent the 1860s knocking around the boomtowns of the Comstock Lode, filing dispatches for the Territorial Enterprise under a borrowed riverboat term, a leadsman's call meaning safe water, two fathoms deep. The camps he covered, and the characters who populated them, miners, con men, preachers, and everyone in between, gave him a lifetime's worth of material and an ear for the peculiar poetry of American speech. He'd go on to write the books that made him famous, but the West made him a writer first.This is a episode from our archives recently remastered.