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Where Adam's diary gave us one grumpy, bewildered account of those first days in Eden, Twain gives Eve her own version, and it changes everything. She's curious about everything, endlessly talkative, and cheerfully certain she's right about most of it. It's Twain at his funniest, and, by the end, at his most tender. This one will surprise you. Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, remains one of America's most enduring literary voices, celebrated for wit as sharp as his social criticism. Eve's Diary stands apart in his body of work, a companion piece to Extracts from Adam's Diary that reveals a gentler, more affectionate side of a writer usually known for satire. Twain wrote it, in part, as a tribute to his own wife, Olivia. This is a episode from our archives recently remastered. If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald or take a no cost path: Follow the podcast so you never miss one and if you enjoyed this story, a five-star rating or review helps others find us. Think of it as applause without waking anyone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Before there was marriage counseling, there was Adam's diary. Mark Twain's comic monologue imagines the Garden of Eden's first resident keeping a running, increasingly exasperated account of the strange new creature who's moved in, started naming his animals, and rewritten the rules of the place without asking. It's Genesis as domestic comedy, and it's every bit as sharp as Twain at his best. Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, remains one of America's most enduring literary voices, known for wit as sharp as his social criticism. From The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to shorter satirical pieces like this one, Twain had a gift for finding the absurd in the everyday, even when the everyday happened to be the Garden of Eden. This is a episode from our archives recently remastered. If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald or take a no cost path: Follow the podcast so you never miss one and if you enjoyed this story, a five-star rating or review helps others find us. Think of it as applause without waking anyone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Early morning on a railroad bridge in northern Alabama. Federal soldiers have laid a loose plank across the ties. A planter in a good frock coat stands on one end of it, hands bound, a rope closely around his neck. His wife and children are thirty miles away, still beyond the Union lines. The water below runs fast and gold in the sun, and he can't stop watching it. Ambrose Bierce served four years in the Union army, and he wrote this in 1890 with a soldier's eye for every rifle, rope and order. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge remains one of the most widely read short stories in American literature. This story is from our archive, recently remastered. If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald or take a no cost path: Follow the podcast so you never miss one and if you enjoyed this story, a five-star rating or review helps others find us. Think of it as applause without waking anyone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Major Richard Dumbarton and Emily Carewe haven’t seen each other in years, not since old grudges and other marriages got in the way. A chance reunion aboard an eastward-bound steamer changes that fast, deck chairs bribed into place and all. But romance runs into arithmetic when the subject of children comes up, and the resulting scramble to make the numbers work is pure Saki mischief. A quick, witty shipboard farce about love, superstition, and creative counting. Hector Hugh Munro, better known by his pen name Saki, was a British writer active in the early twentieth century, celebrated for short fiction that pairs drawing-room manners with a sly, sometimes wicked wit. His stories favor sudden reversals and characters whose composure cracks under the weight of their own absurdities, whether the setting is a country house, a dinner table, or, here, the deck of an ocean liner. Saki wrote several of his pieces as brief one-act playlets, letting dialogue alone carry the comic timing. He died in 1916, but his stories remain a staple of Edwardian comic fiction for their brevity, their bite, and their refusal to take romance, or superstition, entirely seriously. This is a episode from our archives recently remastered. If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald or take a no cost path: Follow the podcast so you never miss one and if you enjoyed this story, a five-star rating or review helps others find us. Think of it as applause without waking anyone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This story is a small masterpiece of exasperation from 1905. Ellis Parker Butler wrote "Pigs Is Pigs" as a jab at corporate red tape, and somehow, more than a hundred years on, it has only gotten funnier. Two guinea pigs arrive at a railway express office. A clerk named Mike Flannery decides they are pigs, the customer insists they are pets, and a single nickel of disagreement sets off a cascade of letters, departments, and, well, arithmetic. You’ll see. Ellis Parker Butler, 1869 to 1937, was one of America’s most prolific humorists, an Iowa-born writer who turned out thousands of stories, essays, and poems across a long career. He published more than thirty books, helped found the Authors’ League of America, and wrote for nearly every major magazine of his day. Yet it was a single short story, "Pigs Is Pigs," dashed off in 1905, that made his name. It sold in the hundreds of thousands, inspired stage and screen adaptations, and quietly seeded a whole comic tradition of small creatures multiplying beyond all reason, a lineage that runs straight through to the tribbles of Star Trek. Not bad for two guinea pigs and a stubborn clerk. This is a episode from our archives recently remastered. If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald or take a no cost path: Follow the podcast so you never miss one and if you enjoyed this story, a five-star rating or review helps others find us. Think of it as applause without waking anyone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Frank Norris could grind a man down to nothing in three hundred naturalist pages. He could also, when the rent was due, write something this loose and this funny. "Two Hearts That Beat as One" sends two soldiers of fortune, one American, one English, gunrunning down the Pacific coast, where they make the oldest mistake there is and fall for the same woman. The cure they settle on is a boxing match. It does not cure them. Frank Norris was thirty-two when he died, in 1902, which is the kind of fact that stops you cold, because by then he’d already written McTeague and The Octopus, the big grinding novels they still hand out on syllabi. But he wrote lighter things too, and the Three Black Crows were his rowdiest invention, three guns-for-hire who turn up in four different stories getting into trouble on land, at sea, and once or twice somewhere stranger. This was their first time out. It was collected after his death, in a book called A Deal in Wheat, in 1903. This is a episode from our archives recently remastered. If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald or take a no cost path: Follow the podcast so you never miss one and if you enjoyed this story, a five-star rating or review helps others find us. Think of it as applause without waking anyone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The note comes on heavy paper from somewhere in Bohemia, unsigned, promising a visitor who will not show his face. He turns out to be very large, very rich, and in a great deal of trouble. Somewhere in a small house in St. John’s Wood there is a photograph. Five attempts to take it have failed. Holmes has three days, a wardrobe full of other men, and Watson, newly married and glad of the excuse, back at his side for an evening of breaking the law in a good cause. The first Sherlock Holmes short story, from The Strand Magazine, 1891. Read by Don McDonald. If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald or take a no cost path: Follow the podcast so you never miss one and if you enjoyed this story, a five-star rating or review helps others find us. Think of it as applause without waking anyone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As a boy he was teased for his tenderness. He kept birds, rabbits, a dog, a small monkey. And a cat, enormous and entirely black, who followed him from room to room and would have followed him into the street. Now he sits in a cell with a pen, determined to set the record down plainly. He is not mad, he tells us. He is not dreaming. Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 tale. WARNING: Contains graphic animal and human violence. Follow and each new story will show up in your library as soon as it's released. No searching, no remembering. This show is one corner of Short Storyverses, a family of fiction podcasts. Some lean literary. Some are funny. Some will keep you up with the lights on, and some belong by the fire in December. There are classics nobody reads anymore and should, and original stories you won't hear anywhere else. They're all read by Don McDonald from his studio booth, and all short enough to finish on a drive, a walk, or a sleepless night. Come explore at shortstoryverses.com. Pick a universe. Stay a while. If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald or take a no cost path: Follow the podcast so you never miss one and if you enjoyed this story, a five-star rating or review helps others find us. Think of it as applause without waking anyone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ed Loyce spends his days fixing radios and televisions in a small town where nothing much happens. One evening he climbs out of his basement workroom, walks into the square, and sees something no decent town would put up with. Then he notices how everyone else is taking it. Philip K. Dick wrote "The Hanging Stranger" in 1953, a year when plenty of Americans had started keeping an eye on their neighbors. Seventy years on, it still makes you check who's standing behind you. Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and spent most of his life in California, writing fast, living broke, and asking one question in more than forty novels and over a hundred short stories: what's real? He won the Hugo Award for The Man in the High Castle in 1963, yet for most of his life he was paid like a pulp writer and read like a cult figure. He died in March 1982, a few months before Blade Runner, adapted from his Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, reached theaters. After that the rest of the world caught up. Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and The Man in the High Castle all came from his pages. The paranoia turned out to be prophecy. If you want more stories like this one, and plenty that are nothing like it, they're all waiting for you at shortstoryverses.com. Go have a look around. Just don't stand under any lampposts on the way there. If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald or take a no cost path: Follow the podcast so you never miss one and if you enjoyed this story, a five-star rating or review helps others find us. Think of it as applause without waking anyone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There’s a reason crows gather in cemeteries. They remember. They watch. And sometimes, they wait. Murder of Crows isn’t a tale borrowed from the past—it’s one I wrote for New Tales Told, a series of original stories that echo in the spaces between memory and myth. This one lingers in the cold silence of the American frontier, where the shadows are long and the watchers have wings. Set in Montana Territory, 1868, Murder of Crows is a western—but not the kind you remember from Saturday matinees. The dead don’t rest. The land doesn’t forget. And the crows? They remember everything. Author's Note There’s an old belief that crows remember faces. That they mourn their dead. That they never forget a slight. It was early morning when a murder of crows descended on the sycamore outside my bedroom window, their cries so sharp and relentless they pulled me from sleep with a strange sense of dread. I lay there, half-conscious and irritated, staring at the ceiling as their screams echoed through the glass. And in that moment—quietly, almost reflexively—I had a thought I wasn’t proud of: Maybe this murder deserves one of its own. From that flash of anger came something unexpected: a story. Murder of Crows began as a whisper of guilt and folklore. Though it draws faint inspiration from the life and legend of Jeremiah Johnson, this tale is entirely imagined—fiction through and through. But like many stories, its roots are tangled in real emotion: grief, memory, regret… and the uncanny way the natural world sometimes stares back. As for the birds? They haven’t left. They’re still watching. Just outside my window. If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald or take a no cost path: Follow the podcast so you never miss one and if you enjoyed this story, a five-star rating or review helps others find us. Think of it as applause without waking anyone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jasper Holt counts other people's money at the Lumber National Bank, and he is very good at it. Out in Rosebank, at the end of a brick path a block long and roofed over with willows, his brother John lives alone, shabby, devout, and nearly invisible. The brothers are not much alike. Sinclair Lewis builds this one patiently, a small arrangement at a time, and then lets the willows lose their leaves. Sinclair Lewis was born in 1885 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, a small town he spent the rest of his life dissecting. He worked his way through Yale, then through the magazine trade, turning out stories for the Saturday Evening Post and others while he learned how to aim. "The Willow Walk" comes from that stretch, 1918, and was picked up that same year for The Best American Short Stories. The novels followed fast, Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, each one taking a layer off American respectability. In 1930 he became the first American awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in Rome in 1951. If this one held you, there's a shelf of them waiting at shortstoryverses.com. Litreading is where the classics live, Chekhov, Faulkner, Chopin, Mansfield, read the way they were meant to be heard. New Tales Told carries original fiction you won't find anywhere else. FRIGHTLY handles the dark. HumorUs takes on the funny. Love Lit, Season's Readings, and Readastorus round it out, the last one built for kids and always free of commercials. All of it narrated in one studio by one voice, all of it free. Come find your next story at . If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald or take a no cost path: Follow the podcast so you never miss one and if you enjoyed this story, a five-star rating or review helps others find us. Think of it as applause without waking anyone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

August 20th, 1910. The worst heat in living memory, the kind that flattens a city and slows the blood. An artist named James Clarence Withencroft spends the morning drawing a man in the dock, caught at the instant sentence is passed on him. Then he walks out into the glare, wanders without direction, and finds himself in a stonemason's yard, where the man from his drawing sits carving a headstone. Neither has ever laid eyes on the other. The name cut into the stone is Withencroft's own, and so is the date. They agree the safest thing is to sit together until midnight passes. W.F. Harvey wrote this in 1910, six pages that have refused to loosen their grip in the century since If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald or take a no cost path: Follow the podcast so you never miss one and if you enjoyed this story, a five-star rating or review helps others find us. Think of it as applause without waking anyone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There are things we expect from the world. Walls stay still. Rooms hold their shape. The spaces we live in behave. And when they don’t, we look for explanations. Old houses settle. Pipes shift. Light plays tricks. But sometimes the world doesn’t explain itself. When an answer can’t be seen, that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. There is something. Something all too real. Something beyond frightening. If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald or take a no cost path: Follow the podcast so you never miss one and if you enjoyed this story, a five-star rating or review helps others find us. Think of it as applause without waking anyone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There is a special horror in hearing a mind unravel from the inside. In The Diary of a Madman, Guy de Maupassant pulls us into the private writings of a man who can no longer trust his own thoughts. His diary entries begin quietly enough—simple observations, small disturbances—until each page edges closer to something darker, something unmoored, something deeply and intimately wrong. This is the slow, suffocating terror of a mind turning against itself. Guy de Maupassant, one of France’s great masters of psychological horror, wrote with an uncanny instinct for the fractures that hide beneath ordinary life. His stories rarely rely on monsters or myth—only on the terrible things people can do, think, or become. If you enjoyed this tale, explore more shadows and unsettling corners in the Short Storyverses collection at shortstoryverses.com. If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald or take a no cost path: Follow the podcast so you never miss one and if you enjoyed this story, a five-star rating or review helps others find us. Think of it as applause without waking anyone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A man insists he is calm… reasonable… even kind. Yet something small and ordinary, something most people would ignore, begins to consume him. It creeps into his thoughts, scrapes against his nerves, and finally drives him toward an act he believes is both necessary and brilliant. But the mind doesn’t stay quiet for long. As the story tightens, the world around him narrows to a single sound he cannot escape. Poe’s tale is a descent told from inside the fall—where the truth comes knocking long before anyone else does. Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) reshaped American literature with his mastery of psychological terror, unreliable narrators, and the eerie beauty of the macabre. A poet, critic, and storyteller, Poe created the modern detective story, refined the Gothic genre, and left behind some of the most haunting works in English. His writing slips into the darker corners of the mind—never with cheap shocks, always with precision and a pulse you can feel. If this tale leaves your heartbeat just a little too loud in your ears, wander deeper into Short Storyverses. From ghosts in the walls to mysteries in the shadows, every story unlocks another room you’re not sure you should enter. But you will. And you’ll want to hear what’s waiting inside. If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald or take a no cost path: Follow the podcast so you never miss one and if you enjoyed this story, a five-star rating or review helps others find us. Think of it as applause without waking anyone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.