Short Story Classics: Free EPUB Editions

The short story is the form that public-domain publishing made easy and the nineteenth century made popular: cheap magazines needed a complete effect in twenty pages, and writers learned to deliver one. This shelf runs from Washington Irving’s Sketch Book of 1819 to Katherine Mansfield’s stories of 1922, through Poe, Gogol, Melville, Chekhov and Wilde.

It is the most uneven category on the site, because a collection and a single tale are not the same object. The Sketch Book is a book of essays and stories; The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is thirty pages. Both are here, with their own counts, so the difference is visible before you download anything.

Every short fiction title on this shelf

Sixteen titles, shortest first in spirit, oldest first in the table.

Year	Title	Author	Form	Words	Reading time
1819	The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.	Washington Irving	Essays and sketches	122,000	7 h
1820	The Legend of Sleepy Hollow	Washington Irving	Novel	12,267	1 h
1848	White Nights	Fyodor Dostoevsky	Novel	118,526	7 h
1853	Bartleby, the Scrivener	Herman Melville	Novel	14,522	1 h
1886	The Decameron	Giovanni Boccaccio	Novel	292,000	16 h
1888	The Happy Prince and Other Tales	Oscar Wilde	Novel	16,085	1 h
1890	An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge	Ambrose Bierce	Novel	3,765	1 h
1892	The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes	Arthur Conan Doyle	Novel	106,000	6 h
1894	The Jungle Book	Rudyard Kipling	Novel	54,000	3 h
1902	The Monkey’s Paw	W. W. Jacobs	Novel	4,033	1 h
1905	The Gift of the Magi	O. Henry	Novel	2,130	1 h
1905	The Return of Sherlock Holmes	Arthur Conan Doyle	Novel	112,155	6 h
1911	The Innocence of Father Brown	G. K. Chesterton	Novel	78,220	4 h
1914	Dubliners	James Joyce	Novel	70,592	4 h
1914	The Wisdom of Father Brown	G. K. Chesterton	Novel	71,782	4 h
1922	The Garden Party and Other Stories	Katherine Mansfield	Novel	57,000	3 h

How this list was made

Books are included when their page records Short stories among the genres, which catches both single tales and collections. A collection’s word count is the whole volume, not one story.

Where a single story from a collection also has its own page on the site, both appear — that is why Sleepy Hollow follows the Sketch Book in the table. Nothing is double-counted in the site-wide totals.

Questions readers ask

What is the shortest thing here?

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, at roughly 12,000 words: one sitting, with the famous ride at the end. The Happy Prince is shorter per tale.

Do I need to read a whole collection?

No. Collections are collections; the stories stand alone, and the book pages list the contents so you can pick one.

Why are Russian and French writers here?

Because the genre is defined by form, not nationality — Chekhov and Maupassant are the two writers who did most to make the modern short story what it is.

Part of the complete catalogue and the themed reading lists. Nearby shelves: Satire · Historical Fiction · Romance · Memoir & Autobiography · Coming of Age · authors A–Z · word counts and reading times.