A little stories

100 Great Short Stories

Okay, I lied. There are so many great short stories that I was unable to trim the list to 100 titles; so here are 160 Great Short Stories for you to enjoy. Click a button to find the best short stories from the authors below. We also have a great collection of Short Stories for Students and a library full of Children's Stories.

The Boy And The Filberts The Night Came Slowly One Summer Night The Coming of the King A Blunder Ex Oblivione Fat And Thin Hearts And Hands Amy's Question My Financial Career The Aged Mother Hermann The Irascible The Man in the Brown Coat The Death Of A Government Clerk The Father The Little Match Girl Louisa May Alcott: A Child's Biography The Terrible Old Man A Vine on a House The Open Window Witches' Loaves The Cats of Ulthar Mark Twain: A Child's Biography The Romance of a Busy Broker A Dead Woman's Secret A Chameleon A Respectable Woman On The Day of the Crucifixion The Dreamer Henry David Thoreau: A Child's Biography The Student The Unkindest Blow The Night Moth With a Crooked Feeler Alexandre The Thorny Road of Honor The Vendetta The Selfish Giant The Looking Glass Vanka The Merino Sheep A Duel The Cripple A Defensive Diamond The Wolves of Cernogatz Esme The Child's Story The Yarkand Manner The Diary of a Madman What Christmas Is As We Grow Older The Disappearance of Crispina Umberleigh The Schartz-Metterklume Method A Baby Tramp The Boarded Window Sredni Vashtar The Man In The Moon Eveline The Veteran The Log The Huntsman An Alpine Divorce A Defenseless Creature What You Want A Cosmopolite in a Cafe A Holiday Task The Model Millionaire Bertie's Christmas Eve The Colonel's Ideas The Tell-Tale Heart Transients in Arcadia Gentle Hand Jim Baker's Blue-Jay Yarn Jimmy Scarecrow's Christmas The Sphinx Without a Secret The Hand A Lickpenny Lover The Interlopers How the Leopard Got His Spots Two Friends A True Story, Repeated Word for Word As I Heard It The Lumber Room Babes in the Jungle The Unrest-Cure After the Race The Last Dream of Old Oak Springtime a la Carte Hyacinth According to Their Lights How I Edited an Agricultural Paper The Fly The Princess And The Puma The Striding Place The Nightingale and the Rose The Cop and the Anthem Federigo's Falcon The Masque of the Red Death The Mockingbird The Notary of Perigueux A Telephone Call Hands The Last Leaf The Cask of Amontillado Gabriel-Ernest The Way to the Dairy A Father's Confession The Furnished Room Chickamauga A Horseman in the Sky The McWilliamses And The Burglar Alarm Aloha Oe The Shoemaker And The Devil How the Widow Won the Deacon The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County A School Story The Necklace A Retrieved Reformation The Bet The Doll's House Christmas Every Day Turkeys Turning The Tables The Last Fight In The Coliseum The Story of Keesh The Nice People The Affair at Coulter's Notch The Laughing Hippopotamus Berenice The Picture in the House One Autumn Night Pigs Is Pigs The Shed Chamber The Happy Prince Keeping Watch Skeleton Lake: An Episode in Camp The Moonlit Road The Alchemist "Girl" The Pimienta Pancakes The Enchanted Bluff Two Gallants The Old Man of the Sea Man From The South The Olive The Velveteen Rabbit A Hunger Artist Miggles The Tomb The Wind's Tale The Girl Who Got Rattled The Ransom of Red Chief Extracts from Adam's Diary Gooseberries "His Wife's Deceased Sister" The Star Gentlemen: The King! The Egg Mademoiselle Fifi The Namesake The Hungry Stones A Call The Darling A Little Cloud

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Episode Library and Show Notes

Episode Library and Show Notes | LSFTP

Latest Stories

The Hamster and The Snake
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The Fence: A Hopeful Story for Kids
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Through The Ages With The Sleep Time Machine: A Bedtime Story for Kids

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Stories by Season

Little Fox Can't Wait to Dream
Ruby Takes Her Time: A Kids Story About Siblings
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Humphrey Wants to Nap: A Rhyming Bedtime Story
Little Rabbit Can't Eat Clover
Bear's Big Sleep: A Thanksgivingish Tale
Tiny Tooth Fairies: A Toothbrushing Tale
Grumbly Bear and Strumbly Bear: A Rhyming Children's Story
Over the Swing: A Musical Kids Story
Little Fox: BEDTIME Version
Humphrey Wants to Nap: BEDTIME Version
Bear's Big Sleep: BEDTIME Version
The Car Ride Episode: Stories for Children

Mouse Makes a Pizza: A Silly Story for Kids
Jamir Stands to the Side: A Story for Quiet Kids
The Birthday That Wasn't: A Fun Story for Kids
Henry Fell into a Book: A Reading Story for Kids
Bear Wakes Up: A Rhyming Story for Kids
The Tap On My Shoulder: An Imaginative Story for Kids
The Strange Story of Lindy Lou: A Rhyming Story for Kids
Elodie is a Superhero: A Special Needs Story for Kids
The Sick Day: A Poem for Kids
The Robot Who Had Feelings: An Empathy Story for Kids
A New Baby: A Sibling Story for Kids

Little Rabbit Helps A Friend: A Valentine's Day Story
Mouse and the Great Rodent Bake Off
Luisa Gets Messy
Humphrey's Tree Falls Down
Little Hedgehog Goes to School: A Silly School Story for Kids
Ava Takes The Moon: A Rhyming Story for Kids
Brambleton Says Yes: A Friendship Story for Kids
Larry's Secret: A Mouse Story for Kids
Little Rabbit's Halloween: A Story for Kids
A Door in the Floor: A Rhyming Story for Kids
Bear's Big Sleep: A Thanksgivingish Story for Kids
Andre and the Elf: A Story for Kids
Little Hedgehog's New Year: A Silly Story for Kids

Little Hedgehog's Valentine: A Friendship Story for Kids
Herman Says Goodbye
All Aboard the Sleep Train: A Bedtime Story for Kids
Brambleton the Ambassador: An Adventure Story for Kids
The Glowing Stones: A Friendship Story for Kids
Hope in the Garden: An Earth Day Story for Kids
Vivi Finds Her Voice: A Story for Kids
Tiny People Speak: Part One
Tiny People Speak: Part Two
Schools Out for Little Hedgehog: A Story for Kids
Little Bear Goes Over the Hill: A Story for Kids

Frog and the High Jump: A Pond Story for Kids
The Acorn: A Friendship Story for Kids
A Hamster Named Bobo: An Adoption Story for Kids
Zebra and Donkey's Halloween
Little Hedgehog Cleans Up
New Version: The Robot Who Had Feelings
The Story Garden: A Creativity Story for Kids
The Gnome and the Seed: A Growing Up Story for Kids
Little Hedgehog's New Year REBROADCAST

The Mistake Artist: Part One
The Mistake Artist: Part Two
We All Fell In
Tad and Fish
Little Hedgehog Gets The Sads
A Giant Story: Part One
A Giant Story: Part Two

The Moon's Side of the Story
Little Hedgehog Goes on a Field Trip
Set Sail On The Sleep Cruise: A Sleep Train Sequel
Herman and the Red Tape: A Frustration Story for Kids
Theo and the Speak Up Fairy: An Assertiveness Story for Kids

Little Hedgehog and the Time Capsule
We All Fell In Too
The Bedtime Socks
Beeble the Caterpillar and the Big Change

Little Hedgehog and Bebe Under the Same Sky: Part One
A Sofa Named Sheila
Lift Off On the Sleep Plane: A Sleep Train Story
Little Hedgehog and Bebe Under the Same Sky: Part Two
Spider and her Plants: A Friendship Story for Kids
Frog and Salamander: A Comparison Story for Kids
Little Hedgehog and the Treehouse
A Walk In The Woods: A Bedtime Story for Kids
The Bird and the House
Mr. Beetle's Story Time

Little Hedgehog and the Tunnel
The Blue House: An Honesty Story for Kids
Under The Sea On The Sleep Submarine: A Sleep Train Story
The Pig Seed
Oakley and the Long Fog
Little Hedgehog Goes Camping
A Parrot's Tale: A Friendship Story for Kids
Little Hedgehog's New Year's Roll

A Cat Story: Part One
A Cat Story: Part Two
Mouse's Time Machine: A Time Travel Story for Kids
Mr. Beetle Tackles Fame
Little Hedgehog Goes to the Sea

Little Hedgehog Writes a Book
Through The Ages With The Sleep Time Machine: A Bedtime Story for Kids
The Story Of A House: A Sleep Story for Kids
The Fence: A Hopeful Story for Kids
Little Hedgehog's Halloween
The Hamster and The Snake

A bit of history…

“The Germans ran into him like they were against the Brest Fortress”

Kolya Sirotinin fell at the age of 19 to challenge the saying “There is no man alone in the field”. But he did not become a legend of the Great Patriotic War, like Alexander Matrosov or Nikolai Gastello.

In the summer of 1941, the 4th Panzer Division of Heinz Guderian, one of the most talented German tank generals, broke through to the Belarusian town of Krichev. Parts of the 13th Soviet Army retreated. Only the gunner Kolya Sirotinin did not retreat - just a boy, short, quiet, frail.
According to an essay in the Oryol collection Good Name, it was necessary to cover the withdrawal of troops. “Two people with a cannon will remain here,” said the battery commander. Nicholas volunteered. The second was the commander himself.

On the morning of July 17, a column of German tanks appeared on the highway.
- Kolya took a position on a hill right on the collective farm field. The cannon sank in high rye, but he could clearly see the highway and the bridge over the river Dobrost, - says Natalya Morozova, director of the Krichev Museum of Local Lore.
When the lead tank reached the bridge, Kolya knocked it out with the first shot. The second shell set fire to an armored personnel carrier that closed the column.
Here we must stop. Because it is still not entirely clear why Kolya was left alone in the field. But there are versions. He, apparently, just had a task - to create a “cork” on the bridge, knocking out the head car of the Nazis. The lieutenant at the bridge corrected the fire, and then, apparently, caused the fire of our other artillery to jam from German tanks. Because of the river. It is authentically known that the lieutenant was wounded and then he left in the direction of our positions. There is an assumption that Kolya was supposed to go to his own after completing the task. But... he had 60 shells. And he stayed!
Two tanks tried to pull the lead tank off the bridge, but were also hit. The armored car tried to cross the river Dobrost not on the bridge. But she got bogged down in a swampy shore, where another shell found her. Kolya fired and fired, knocking out tank after tank...
Guderian's tanks ran into Kolya Sirotinin, as if into the Brest Fortress. Already burned 11 tanks and 6 armored personnel carriers! The fact that more than half of them were burned by Sirotinin alone is for sure (artillery from across the river also got some). For almost two hours of this strange battle, the Germans could not understand where the Russian battery had dug in. And when they reached Kolin's position, he had only three shells left. They offered to surrender. Kolya responded by firing at them from a carbine.

This last fight was short...
“Still, he is Russian, is such admiration necessary?”
Lieutenant of the 4th Panzer Division Henfeld wrote these words in his diary: “July 17, 1941. Sokolnichi, near Krichev. In the evening they buried an unknown Russian soldier. He alone stood at the cannon, shot a column of tanks and infantry for a long time, and died. Everyone was amazed at his courage... Oberst (Colonel) before the grave said that if all the Fuhrer's soldiers fought like this Russian, they would conquer the whole world. Three times they fired volleys from rifles. After all, he is Russian, is such admiration necessary?
- In the afternoon, the Germans gathered at the place where the gun stood. We, the locals, were also forced to come there, - recalls Verzhbitskaya. - To me, as knowing German, the chief German with orders ordered to translate. He said that this is how a soldier should defend his homeland - Fatherland. Then, from the pocket of our killed soldier's tunic, they took out a medallion with a note about who and where. The chief German told me: “Take it and write to your relatives. Let a mother know what a hero her son was and how he died.” I was afraid to do it... Then, standing in the grave and covering Sirotinin's body with a Soviet raincoat, a young German officer tore out a piece of paper and a medallion from me and said something rudely.
For a long time after the funeral, the Nazis stood at the cannon and the grave in the middle of the collective farm field, not without admiration, counting the shots and hits.

How Kolya Sirotinin ended up in a mass grave.
Today, in the village of Sokolnichi, there is no grave in which the Germans buried Kolya. Three years after the war, the remains of Kolya were transferred to a mass grave, the field was plowed up and sown, the cannon was handed over for salvage. And he was called a hero only 19 years after the feat. And not even a Hero of the Soviet Union - he was posthumously awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, I degree.
Only in 1960 the staff of the Central Archive The Soviet army scouted all the details of the feat. Monument to the hero put, but clumsy, with a fake gun and just somewhere off to the side.

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A bit of history | Nauka i Zhizn

We are surrounded by a variety of automata. And their number is constantly growing. We get so used to it that we very rarely ask ourselves questions: how long ago did they arise? How old is, for example, a water vending machine? It is unlikely that many will dare to give him more than 50-100 years. But in reality? ..

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It turns out that back in the 2nd century BC, Egyptian priests shocked the imagination of believers with an ingenious device for selling “holy water”, made by the famous Heron of Alexandria to their order.

"Automatic machines are probably as old as human beings," said the Austrian scientist Heinz Zemanek, who gave a lecture in Moscow on the development of automatic machines and devices. He mentioned the mechanical artist described by Homer, who knew how to draw, about the automaton found by the Argonauts on the island of Crete, which warned the Greeks about danger, about the mechanical lion made by Leonardo da Vinci, which took flowers from its chest and presented them to the Prince of Milan ...

No matter how far we look into history, there is always information about some kind of self-acting device.

Gradually accumulating knowledge and skill, a person learned to create amazing mechanisms that could work without his intervention.

Skilled mechanicuses of the Middle Ages built mechanical porters, weavers, hairdressers. And often their names have been preserved for posterity precisely thanks to these, in general, useless toys, although they also created other very necessary automata. So it was, for example, with the French mechanic Vaukanson. In 1753 he built a mechanical loom. This was forgotten, but the admiring description of his “fluttering duck” passes from book to book, which beat its wings, quacked, pecked at food and, as it were, digested it.

The history of automata is extremely rich. And it continues to accumulate more and more new facts, extracted from the past by the persistent search of scientists. Cemanek spoke about some of these machines with great enthusiasm. Among the amazing humanoid mechanisms - androids built in the 18th century, there was the famous "scribe", who, "knowing" 69 letters (obviously, several alphabets), could write entire phrases, changing the size of the letters depending on the paper format. This automaton, “the prototype of a digital and analog machine,” as Cemanek called it, had a special drum inside, on which it was possible, in modern terms, to program the writing of any text with a set of pins. It is interesting to recall that for a similar automatic machine built 14 years later, the Swiss watchmaker Dro was persecuted by the church, was declared a sorcerer and thrown into prison, and his wonderful devices, among which was the “musician” who played the harpsichord, were hidden in basements.

Very funny automata of the past made a great impression on contemporaries, however, despite all the wit of their designs, they had no practical value. No wonder Marx wrote that the clock was the first automatic machine created for practical purposes.

Already the mechanism of the Ctesibius water clock gave succeeding generations the idea of gearing, and then, centuries later, remarkable mechanics, competing between the cathedral, built clocks that not only indicated the time, day of the week, date, month, year, but also through ingenious combinations of gears, cams and levers set in motion various figures that played out entire scenes. With the complexity of its device, such watches can compete even with many modern mechanical machines.

Centuries have passed since the appearance of the first machines, and today no longer mechanical, but electronic, automatically operating devices delight a person. They predict the weather, operate machines, diagnose diseases, and even, although not as well as a living chess player, play chess. But it is worth remembering that quite recently, in 1950, one of the books on automation wrote: “It is in vain to assume that it is possible to make automata that will play chess ... an absurd idea."

By the way, the history of machines playing chess begins with a curiosity.

... From city to city, from king to king, the Hungarian mechanic and inventor Farkas Kempelen traveled with his automatic "chess player" built in 1769. His submachine gun beat almost everyone who got up the courage to fight him. But one day during the game a fire broke out, and ... a chess player, frightened by screams, jumped out of the "machine".