In the 19th Century particularly, good boys are supposed to enjoy the fruits of the righteousness, and bad boys were destined for eternal damnation, at least according to Sunday School books, but according to Mark Twain, life often contradicted expectation.

Pride does seem to go before a fall… In this very short story a young man’s life unravels thanks to a small vanity-induced dissimulation.

This special short, short story centers on a different kind of haunting, not from without, but from within. The darkness that comes from a profound loneliness that quietly haunts the souls of many.

Happiness has always been elusive, usually found in unexpected places and, often, in the wake of the worst life events

In this heart-warming story, an affluent couple discovers what is truly important in life in the wake of both a fiscal and physical tragedy.

Kathleen Norris was, for a time, the highest paid female writer in early 20th-century America.

Virginia Wolff had a talent for taking mundane observations and weaving them into enchanting tales. Something a normal as watching two men on an ordinary a day at the beach became an impassioned and poignant story in her hands.

Born to an upstanding and literary Victorian family, Virginia Wolff suffered from serious psychological issues which may have been part of the genius behind her introspective and emotional powerful writing. She and her husband founded the famous British publishing house Hogarth Press in 1917.

Ghost stories have been told around the world and often based on mythical creatures or spirits. Those living in the cold, snowy regions of Japan created the legend of a winter spirit called Yuki-Onna (or snow woman) whose beauty allows her to prey on those lost in brutal winter storms.

What led a man to live an isolated life at his ramshackle cabin, with a boarded up window, in the former American wilderness? What is the tragic story that led him to this doleful existence? Here is his traumatic tale.

As Halloween approaches, our tales of horror grow more grisly with a classic scary story, The Black Cat by one of America’s greatest devisers of dread, Edgar Allen Poe

What should we do, when should we do it, and whose direction should we take? Those three questions have plagued humanity throughout time. Where can the answers be found or are they unanswerable?

What is truth? How does our perception color the facts as we observe them. Those differences how we see the world complicates this Japanese murder investigation in this renowned short story.

This profound modernist fable has echoed for almost a century. Also called "In a Bamboo Grove," this 1929 short story was inspiration for the critically acclaimed 1950 Japanese film, "Rashomon."