LitReading - Short Stories and Timeless Tales

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LitReading - Short Stories and Timeless Tales episodes

October 19 Below Ten Thousand by Don McDonald — All the Time and No Time
He has four words. He's had them for forty-two years. He's said them in the car, he's said them in the shower with the water running, and he still can't get the stress to fall where it belongs.

Now the seatbelt sign is on, the descent has started, and his brother is running out of days. In his jacket pocket is a voicemail he has never played.

There's a rule pilots follow below ten thousand feet. Nothing gets said that doesn't need saying. He always thought that sounded like a good way to live.

An original story, written and read by Don McDonald.

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14 min
October 15 The McWilliamses and the Burglar Alarm by Mark Twain — Confounding Contraptions Are Nothing New
Mark Twain falls into conversation with a pleasant gentleman who has mild opinions on weather, crops, literature, scandal and religion. Then the talk lands on burglar alarms, and the gentleman is suddenly not mild at all. His was the most imposing alarm in America. It had a gong the size of a washbowl, forty-seven little tags, and an expert from New York who always came when called, and always remembered to send a bill. Twain, who had an alarm put into his own Hartford house the year before he wrote this, lets the man talk.

First published in Harper’s Christmas supplement, December 1882.

This is a recently remastered story from our archive.
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17 min
October 12 Still Water by Don McDonald — Four aircraft carriers in a lake?
Dr. Nathan Cole measures water for a living. It's quiet work, gauges and spreadsheets, the slow arithmetic of things that don't change much. Then a reservoir gains four inches overnight with no rain, no inflow, no explanation, and gives them back by morning. Everyone blames the sensor. The sensor is fine. What follows is the worst thing a careful man can discover, which is that he's been measuring the right thing all along.

If you like short stories, there's a multiverse of them at shortstoryverses.com.

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45 min
October 08 The Romance of a Busy Broker by O. Henry — A Wall Street Love Story with a Twist
Wall Street, a spring morning at the turn of the century. The ticker is running hot, the telephone won’t quit, and Harvey Maxwell, broker, is handling it all like a man with springs where his heart should be. His clerk thinks the boss is slipping. His stenographer has something on her mind. Then a window opens, and somebody on the Exchange starts clubbing the stuffing out of Union Pacific.

O. Henry at full gallop, in a nine-minute comedy from The Four Million, read by Don McDonald.

This is a story from the archives recently remastered.

Litreading is part of the Short Storyverses network of fiction podcasts. More stories, more feeds, at shortstoryverses.com.
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11 min
October 05 Autopay by Don McDonald — Following Her Dead Mother’s Credit Card
There is a job nobody warns you about. After the dying comes the paperwork, the hold music, the strangers in call centers who need proof that she is gone.

For two years she was her mother’s caregiver. Now she is her mother’s administrator. She makes lists. She keeps folders. She is very good at this.

Then she reaches the bottom of the last statement.

An original story, written and read by Don McDonald.

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19 min
October 01 Tobermory by Saki — A Proper British Cat Tells All
Every house party has a guest who knows too much.

A mild little man named Cornelius Appin has spent seventeen years on one problem. He believes he's solved it: he has taught a cat to speak. The company around Lady Blemley's tea table does not believe him — and that, as it happens, is the last comfortable moment anyone in the house will enjoy.

Pour yourself some tea. Mind the saucer.

Saki was the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916), the sharpest wit of the Edwardian age. Born in Burma and raised in Devon by a grandmother and two aunts he could not abide, he became a foreign correspondent before turning his pen on polite society. He borrowed his pen name from the cupbearer in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. When war came in 1914, he enlisted as a private at forty-three and refused a commission; he was killed by a sniper in France on November 14, 1916. His last words were “Put that bloody cigarette out.”

“Tobermory” first appeared in the Westminster Gazette in 1909 and was collected in The Chronicles of Clovis in 1911.

Read by Don McDonald. LitReading is part of the Short Storyverses network. shortstoryverses.com

This is a story from the archives recently remastered.

We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks.

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20 min
September 28 His Own Voice by Don McDonald — A Graphophone Records What Was Never Said
Winter, 1906. A clerk who speaks to no one from Saturday to Monday buys a mahogany graphophone for far less than it’s worth. The widow selling it keeps her eyes on the snow. Her husband, she says, liked to keep his own voice.

He carries it home and records his diary each night, and the machine hands him back to himself, the nearest thing to company he has. Then the wax starts holding something he never put there.

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13 min
September 24 A Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell — The Women See What the Men Miss
A farmer lies dead in his bed with a rope around his neck. That morning his wife sat in the kitchen, pleating her apron, and said she slept through it.

So the men come out to the farmhouse: the sheriff, the county attorney, and the neighbor who found her. They search the cold rooms for something that will hold up in court. Two of their wives ride along to gather a few things for the woman in the county jail. Nobody expects much from them.

The kitchen is a mess of unfinished chores and small things left where they fell.

Susan Glaspell once covered a murder case like this as a young reporter in Iowa, and it stayed with her. She wrote the story in 1917, and a century later it still hasn't loosened its grip.

This is a story from the archives recently remastered.
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45 min
September 21 A Foot Too Deep by Don McDonald — A Blacksmith Chooses the Terms of a New Orleans Duel
Nobody in New Orleans had ever made Bernard de Marigny look foolish in public. He was rich past counting, small as a foil, and very likely the most dangerous man in Louisiana with a pistol in his hand. Then a blacksmith from a far parish, seven feet of him and slow to speak, said something true on the floor of the legislature, and the whole chamber laughed.

The card came to the forge two days later.

The blacksmith was no duelist. He was, however, a man who had spent his life learning where something hard gives.

From Short Storyverses. More at shortstoryverses.com.
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15 min
September 17 A Slice of Life by P. G. Wodehouse — A Chemist, a Baronet and a Girl Locked Upstairs
A man in a country pub insists his story is true. It concerns his brother Wilfred, a chemist of some genius, a jolly outdoor girl with a wholesome sunburn, and a Yorkshire baronet who spells his name with four small f's. Somebody is being kept behind a locked door on the second floor. Somebody else is about to regret asking what's true to life.

This is P.G. Wodehouse, 1926, at his most gleefully unreliable.

First published in Liberty, August 7, 1926; collected in Meet Mr. Mulliner, 1927. Read by Don McDonald. HumorUs is part of the Short Storyverses network. shortstoryverses.com

This is a story from the archives recently remastered.

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37 min