Third Batch of 22 Stories Added

Twenty-two stories were added as a group on July 7-8, 2025.

Included here are:

• the (year of publication)
• the word count, and
• the approximate reading times (silent/aloud)

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• "Araby" by James Joyce (XXXX) XXXX words, XX/XX minutes
• "Bartleby the Scrivener" by Herman Melville (XXXX) XXXX words, XX/XX minutes
• "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" by F. Scott Fitzgerald (XXXX) XXXX words, XX/XX minutes
• "Culhwch and Olwen" from The Mabinogion (XXXX) XXXX words, XX/XX minutes
• "The Emperor's New Clothes" by Hans Christian Andersen (1837) 1,870 words, 10/15 minutes
• "The Happy Prince" by Oscar Wilde (XXXX) XXXX words, XX/XX minutes
• "Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway (XXXX) XXXX words, XX/XX minutes
• "Iron Hans" from Grimm's Fairy Tales (XXXX) XXXX words, XX/XX minutes
• "The Lady or the Tiger?" by Frank R. Stockton (XXXX) XXXX words, XX/XX minutes
• "The Lottery Ticket" by Anton Chekhov (1887) 1,870 words, 9/14 minutes
• "The Man who Never Laughed During the Rest of His Days" from The 1,001 Nights (1882) 2,530 words, 13/19 minutes
• "Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka (XXXX) XXXX words, XX/XX minutes
• "The Monkey's Paw" by W. W. Jacobs (XXXX) XXXX words, XX/XX minutes
• "The Open Window" by Saki (XXXX) XXXX words, XX/XX minutes
• "A Pair of Silk Stockings" by Kate Chopin (XXXX) XXXX words, XX/XX minutes
• "The Pardoner's Tale" by Geoffrey Chaucer (1400/1904) 1,620 words, 10/16 minutes
• "The Pied Piper" by Robert Browning (1842) 2,080 words, 10/16 minutes
• "The Rocking Horse Winner" by D. H. Lawrence (XXXX) XXXX words, XX/XX minutes
• "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner (XXXX) XXXX words, XX/XX minutes
• "The Three Hermits" by Leo Tolstoy (XXXX) XXXX words, XX/XX minutes
• "A White Heron" by Sarah Orne Jewett (XXXX) XXXX words, XX/XX minutes
• "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (XXXX) XXXX words, XX/XX minutes

"The Door in the Wall" Added

On July 6, 2025, I added "The Door in the Wall" by H. G. Wells.

Included here is the (year of publication), the word count, and the approximate reading times (silent/aloud).

• "The Door in the Wall" by H. G. Wells.(1906) 6,920 words, 35/53 minutes

Second Batch of 14 Stories Added

Fourteen stories were added as a group on June 30, 2025.

Included here are:

• the (year of publication)
• the word count, and
• the approximate reading times (silent/aloud)

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• "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" by Stephen Crane (1898) 4,350 words, 22/33 minutes
• "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" by Mark Twain (1865) 2,570 words, 13/20 minutes
• "Momotaro, or the Story of the Son of a Peach" by Yei Theodora Ozaki (1908) 4,400 words, 22/34 minutes
• "The Necklace" by Guy de Maupassant (1884) 2,850 words, 14/22 minutes
• "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce (1890) 3,760 words, 20/29 minutes
• "Oshidori (The Mandarin Ducks)" by Lafcadio Hearne (1904) 590 words, 3/5 minutes
• "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" by Bret Harte (1869) 4,030 words, 20/31 minutes
• "The Penance of Magdalena" by J. Smeaton Chase (1915) 5,380 words, 27/41 minutes
• "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" by Rudyard Kipling (1894) 5,920 words, 30/46 minutes
• "Rip Van Winkle" by Washington Irving (1819) 6,890 words, 34/53 minutes
• "The Soul of a Regiment" by Talbot Mundy (1912) 5,000 words, 25/38 minutes
• "The Speckled Band" by Arthur Conan Doyle (1892) 9,820 words, 49/76 minutes
• "Susannah and the Elders" from The Bible (2nd c BCE, trans. 1611) 1,450 words, 7/11 minutes
• "Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1835) 5,240 words, 26/40 minutes

Reading Times

The reading times given at the start of each story are only approximate. The values given (already highly variable, depending on your reading speed) have been rounded to the nearest minute.

They are calculated at:

• 200 words a minute for reading silently
• 130 words a minute for reading aloud

Your reading speed--and thus your reading time--may vary!

First Batch of 5 Stories Added

These 5 stories were actually created for the original "Best Stories" website, and were moved here from there on June 22, 2025.

Included here are:

• the (year of publication)
• the word count, and
• the approximate reading times (silent/aloud)

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• "Acoma," from Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather (1927) 5,310 words, 27/41 minutes
• "The Caballero's Way" by O. Henry (1914) 4,650 words, 23/36 minutes
• "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe (1846) 2,345 words, 12/18 minutes
• "Childe Rowland" by Joseph Jacobs (1890) 1,840 words, 9/14 minutes
• "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" by M. R. James (1904) 7,990 words, 40/61 minutes

The Cask of Amontillado

Story Stats:
Published: XXX; Word Count: about 2,345;
Reading Time (What's this?): about 12 minutes silently, about 18 minutes aloud

Did you know you can discuss this story with me in a live chat?
See Lessons with James for details.

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TEXT

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The following characters appear or are mentioned in this story:

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Monsters in the Odyssey

Odysseus tells his story to King Alcinous and his wife Queen Arete. (Wikimedia)

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Homer's book The Odyssey begins in medias res, "in the middle of things," with Odysseus's son Telemachus setting out to find his lost father. We pick up the story with Odysseus captive on Calypso's island--one of the last stops in the journey--and then visiting the land of the Phaeacians, where the hero recounts his journey thus far. This is the pith of Odysseus's odyssey. It's in Books 9-12 (of 24), near the middle of The Odyssey. (The remaining books are about Odysseus's return to Ithaca and the challenges he faces there.)

There's good reason to think of this King of Ithaca as "clever Odysseus," because he had to be mighty clever to overcome the trials of that 10-year journey home after the Trojan War. (It was he who devised the "Trojan Horse" as a means to bring that war to an end--clever indeed!) Drawing on his name, his journey is how we got the English common noun for a long, eventful journey: "an odyssey."

When we think of his odyssey, we can see it largely as a series of encounters with one monster after another.

Note: Items in [square brackets] and the notes were added by yours truly.

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