Anton Chekhov’s The Lady with the Dog is a nuanced short story about Dmitri Gurov, a disillusioned married banker, and Anna Sergeyevna, a young married woman, who begin an affair while vacationing in Yalta. What starts as a casual fling transforms into deep, mutual love, forcing them to confront the emptiness of their conventional lives…
The Turn of the Screw is an 1898 gothic horror novella by Henry James about a governess at a remote estate who believes the children she cares for are being haunted by ghosts of former employees, leading to a story of psychological horror, ambiguity, and unreliable narration. The novella is famous for its ambiguity, leaving…
Bartleby, the Scrivener is a famous short story by Herman Melville, first published in 1853, about a Wall Street lawyer who hires a quiet, efficient copyist named Bartleby, who gradually begins to refuse all work with the phrase, “I would prefer not to,” leading to his tragic isolation and demise. The story explores themes of…
Rip Van Wrinkle by Washington Irving needs no introduction. It is one of the most well-known stories ever written, and has been parodied more times than years Rip was asleep. For any of you who have been sleeping longer than Rip, let’s summarize the plot again: “Rip Van Winkle” is an 1819 short story by…
The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in 1892. When I tell people that this is one of the great and earliest Feminist stories, they say okay. When I tell them that it was written way back in 1892, they’re shocked. The story itself is about a woman’s descent…
A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor needs no introduction. It’s one of the most celebrated short stories of all time. When Grandma (unnamed) decides she would rather go to Tennessee than Florida after she reads about a serial killer going there. Against her better judgment, Grandma goes ahead on the trip.…
Can you believe it? With the hundreds of stories here on Real Flashbytes, we don’t have any Poe. Not one story. So, no better way to start things off than with the Tell-tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe, circa. 1843. The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe is one of the best known stories ever.…
The Night the Ghost Got In by James Thurber is one of our favorite stories from the man who practically put the New Yorker on the map. That’s right, back then magazines like the New Yorker, the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers were jam-packed with short stories. Today, as Vonnegut often said, you couldn’t even…
We love stories that are self-contained. TRUE Flashbytes. In fact, it’s so easy to place it even fits right in on Reddit. The Sudden Walk by Franz Kafka is one of our favorite stories of all time. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir The actual story itself is only two sentences long, with the first…
The Mangler is a Stephen King short story about a demonic, sentient laundry press machine that causes a series of gruesome deaths at a laundromat, which a police detective investigates, eventually discovering the machine is possessed and attempting to exorcise it. First published in Cavalier magazine in 1972, it was later collected in King’s 1978…
