LitReading - Original Short Stories and Classic Tales

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.