LitReading - Short Stories and Timeless Tales

This is more a satirical essay than an actual short story, but it makes me smile.

The first telephone was demonstrated at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. By 1880, many wealthier families were using the new communication device regularly and one of the 19th century’s best known authors and satirists observed some anecdotal differences in the way men and women communicate.

Samuel Clemens better known as Mark Twain is one of the most famous American authors of all time. This story was penned 4 years after his success with Tom Sawyer and about 5 years before he completed Huckleberry Finn. In 1884 he formed his own publishing company which went on to posthumously publish the best-selling memoirs of President Ulysses S. Grant.

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We are complex creatures and grow more so with time. Every relationship adds or subtracts from who we are. No relationship is more life changing than marriage and for a woman thrice married in pre-suffrage America the stigma of mutual divorce seems insurmountable until her third husband’s comes to a startling revelation.

Best known for her novels, Edith Wharton was a prolific writer of short stories. Growing up among New York’s upper class, she created realistic portrayals of America’s Gilded Age pseudo aristocracy. In 1921, she became the the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Literature for her book, The Age of Innocence.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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."

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Would it be better to start life as an old man and end it as an infant? That was the question posed by Mark Twain that inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald to write his short story, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."

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