# Link to a great short story **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [December 31, 2010, 6:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/link-to-a-great-short-story/565974 "2010-12-31T18:59:18Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Sitnam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Sitnam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sitnam)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2010, 6:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/link-to-a-great-short-story/565974/1 "2010-12-31T18:59:18Z")
[We’ve done this before](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=467743) but many of the stories Dopers contributed can’t be found online. I’d love to read the best short stories I don’t have to pay for. Here are my contributions: The Lottery - Shirley Jackson A junior highschool standard. Guts - Chuck Palahniuk The grossest story I’ve ever read, or ever want to read. It’s a Good Life - Jerome Bixby The creepiest short story I’ve ever read. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2010, 7:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/link-to-a-great-short-story/565974/2 "2010-12-31T19:35:28Z")
All of these stories are still under copyright. As far as I can tell, each of these links is to stolen content. ---
**Author:** ![twickster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ec9cab/32.png) [@twickster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/twickster)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2010, 9:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/link-to-a-great-short-story/565974/3 "2010-12-31T21:26:08Z")
> [@Sitnam](#): > > I’d love to read the best short stories I don’t have to pay for. I recommend that you check out the public library. I’ve deleted your links as being to copyrighted material. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2010, 9:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/link-to-a-great-short-story/565974/4 "2010-12-31T21:34:03Z")
“Guts” is the story I want to unread. Jesus Christ, man. ---
**Author:** ![Max\_Torque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e9bcb4/32.png) [@Max\_Torque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_Torque)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2011, 4:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/link-to-a-great-short-story/565974/5 "2011-01-03T16:26:25Z")
Well, I can’t guarantee the quality, but I’ve found some gems at [MicroHorror](http://www.microhorror.com/microhorror/). The site’s full of short stories, none more than 666 words long, contributed by anyone who wants to write. ---
**Author:** ![Mahaloth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mahaloth/32/1079_2.png) [@Mahaloth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mahaloth)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2011, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/link-to-a-great-short-story/565974/6 "2011-01-03T16:54:52Z")
Well, you should read Edgar Allan Poe’s stuff. He was an amazing writer and losing him at age 48 was terrible. [Masque of the Red Death](http://www.online-literature.com/poe/36/) All his stuff is public domain, by the way. Go to Project Gutenberg and you can get free ebooks and stuff, too. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2011, 9:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/link-to-a-great-short-story/565974/7 "2011-01-03T21:11:50Z")
For more standards, see the stories of Saki (H. H. Munro), like [“The Open Window”](http://www.online-literature.com/hh-munro/1851/). ---
**Author:** ![Sodalite](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/34f0e0/32.png) [@Sodalite](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sodalite)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2011, 11:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/link-to-a-great-short-story/565974/8 "2011-01-03T23:50:56Z")
As far as I know, all of the books on [Arthur’s Classic Novels](http://arthursclassicnovels.com/index.html) are part of the public domain and are legal to read where they are. The site has sections for short stories and some of the authors (like H. H. Munro and Jack London) have short story collections in their sections. Yay! I like helping. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2011, 4:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/link-to-a-great-short-story/565974/9 "2011-01-04T04:05:15Z")
> [@Thudlow\_Boink](#): > > For more standards, see the stories of Saki (H. H. Munro), like [“The Open Window”](http://www.online-literature.com/hh-munro/1851/). Okay, not only is this one of the most clever stories written, but I had an even more intense experience reading it. Which made it… cleverer. I came across this as a kid in an “Alfred Hitchcock’s favorites” anthology. So it was surrounded by ghost stories. Good ghost stories. And it looked like a ghost story. it started like a ghost story. Hell, to me it WAS a ghost story… almost all the way to the end. I wish I knew how to give others… or at least my kids… that feeling of being taken, but thoroughly enjoying it as it happens. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_A.Robrin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sam_a.robrin/32/14497_2.png) [@Sam\_A.Robrin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_A.Robrin)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2011, 2:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/link-to-a-great-short-story/565974/10 "2011-01-06T02:34:43Z")
I’ll do you one better. I showed up at ninth grade drama try-outs and was handed a script, assigned a role, and bidden to get up on stage and act it out. I’d never seen or even heard of the play before, or the short story it was based on. I forged right ahead, participating in the events as they happened. “The Lottery.” I was so shocked, I recall sitting down in the middle of the sidewalk on my way home to think over all I’d been through. ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2011, 3:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/link-to-a-great-short-story/565974/11 "2011-01-06T15:21:00Z")
A few favorites by G. K. Chesterton: [The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown](http://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/queertrades/files/cqtchap1.html). A classic British detective story. Major Brown enters the detective’s office in hopes of finding out why he encountered a garden with the words “DEATH TO MAJOR BROWN” spelled out in yellow pansies, a stranger ordered him to fend off jackals, and a severed head in the middle of the street is screaming at him. The resolution explains it all in a perfectly logical way. [The Dagger with Wings](http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/chesterton/gk/c52fb/chapter30.html). Another classic detective story set in a good, old-fashioned isolated Victorian mansion in the countryside. A father and son have both been brutally murdered, seemingly by an occultic foe who has the ability to fly and walk through walls. Again, the resolution brilliantly explains it all. [The Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse](http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/0500421h.html#c01). This one I won’t even try writing a summary for, but it is among the most brilliant stories ever. Borges called it the greatest story of the twentieth century. Also recommended, [_Fifty-One Tales_,](http://www.fullbooks.com/Fifty-One-Tales.html)by Lord Dunsany. The title is self-explanatory; the stories are short enough that I could post an entire one here. > [@Lord Dunsany](#): > > Charon leaned forward and rowed. All things were one with his weariness. > > It was not with him a matter of years or of centuries, but of wide floods of time, and an old heaviness and a pain in the arms that had become for him part of the scheme that the gods had made and was of a piece with Eternity. > > If the gods had even sent him a contrary wind it would have divided all time in his memory into two equal slabs. > > So grey were all things always where he was that if any radiance lingered a moment among the dead, on the face of such a queen perhaps as Cleopatra, his eyes could not have perceived it. > > It was strange that the dead nowadays were coming in such numbers. They were coming in thousands where they used to come in fifties. It was neither Charon’s duty nor his wont to ponder in his grey soul why these things might be. Charon leaned forward and rowed. > > Then no one came for a while. It was not usual for the gods to send no one down from Earth for such a space. But the gods knew best. > > Then one man came alone. And the little shade sat shivering on a lonely bench and the great boat pushed off. Only one passenger: the gods knew best. And great and weary Charon rowed on and on beside the little, silent, shivering ghost. > > And the sound of the river was like a mighty sigh that Grief in the beginning had sighed among her sisters, and that could not die like the echoes of human sorrow failing on earthly hills, but was as old as time and the pain in Charon’s arms. > > Then the boat from the slow, grey river loomed up to the coast of Dis and the little, silent shade still shivering stepped ashore, and Charon turned the boat to go wearily back to the world. Then the little shadow spoke, that had been a man. > > “I am the last,” he said. > > No one had ever made Charon smile before, no one before had ever made him weep. ---
**Author:** ![Le\_Ministre\_de\_l\_au-dela](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/le_ministre_de_l_au-dela/32/12181_2.png) [@Le\_Ministre\_de\_l\_au-dela](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Le_Ministre_de_l_au-dela)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2011, 3:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/link-to-a-great-short-story/565974/12 "2011-01-06T15:41:11Z")
There are ten great stories [right here](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=591295), and the authors would appreciate your comments and votes. ---
**Author:** ![Annie-Xmas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecc23a/32.png) [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2011, 3:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/link-to-a-great-short-story/565974/13 "2011-01-06T15:54:49Z")
Most people know the short story [Lamb to the Slaughter](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamb_to_the_Slaughter), but many don’t know it was written by Roald Dahl before he started writing children’s books.