A short story in the "Doom of London" series. It begins: "The front door bell tinkled impatiently; evidently somebody was in a hurry. Alan Hubert answered the call, a thing that even a distinguished physician...
This was the third-best selling book in the United States in 1895. It begins: "Early in the spring of the year 1884, the three-masted schooner Castor, from San Francisco to Valparaiso, was struck by a tornado...
Fred M. White published this fictional story in 1903 about London in the grip of a severe 4-day arctic snow-storm, showing the hardships and consequences for which the city was unprepared, including price gouging...
A romance set in Italy involving a love triangle of Helen, Inez, and Jack, tangled up in a spell of dual personalities, in the present and in the past. Excerpts: ... "SLOWLY THE SPELL BEGAN TO WORK UPON INEZ’...
Edited by Joseph Lewis French, this collection of 9 riddle stories includes "The Mysterious Card" and its sequel by Cleveland Moffett, "The Oblong Box" by Poe, "A Terribly Strange Bed" by Wilkie Collins, "The...
Called the most famous riddle mystery of all time, this very short story poses a dilemma. A man is sentenced to an unusual punishment for having a romance with a king's beloved daughter. Taken to the public...
This is a collection of short essays by students at Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah) who push the boundaries of traditional literary study to explore the benefits of digital tools in academic writing....
A double adventure written at the end of the 19th century, somewhat in the theme of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth, telling of a submarine trip in...
A retired middle-aged gentleman and his wife take a long walk, arm-in-arm, many miles, up hills, across fields, with a laden knapsack and a heavy picnic basket, and yet they are completely at ease because of...
Sequel to "The Mysterious Card", in which the mystery of the card is resolved. According to Uncertain Endings: The World's Greatest Unsolved Mystery Stories by Otto Penzler (Penguin Books, 2006), this 2-part...
(This has been called one of the two most famous riddle stories of all time, along with "The Lady, or the Tiger?" by Frank Stockton.) Burwell, a New Yorker in Paris, during intermission at the Folies Bergère...
This short story must have been the inspiration for the popular movie "Ghost Busters" (1984). The humorist-author here tells the tale of a scientist-philosopher who invents devices to capture ghosts and sets...
Do you love mystery stories, such as the Sherlock Holmes stories and those of Edgar Allan Poe and Agatha Christie? Do you ever yearn to be a good writer of mysteries? Carolyn Wells was a prolific author of mystery...
Flower fables was the first work published by Louisa May Alcott and appeared on December 9, 1854. The book was a compilation of fanciful stories first written six years earlier for Ellen Emerson (daughter of...
The story chronicles journalist Georges Duroy's corrupt rise to power from a poor ex-NCO to one of the most successful men in Paris, most of which he achieves by manipulating a series of powerful, intelligent,...
An account of the most remarkable mail service ever in existence, and its place in history. The Pony Express was the first rapid transit and the first fast mail line across the North American continent from...
This story was the winner of the first-place prize awarded by Amazing Stories magazine in 1927, having been selected from about 360 stories submitted for the Cover Prize Contest. The editor praised the previously...
This was one of the 6 science fiction stories published in the first issue (April 1926) of the first magazine devoted to science fiction, Amazing Stories, edited and published by Hugo Gernsback, now considered...
This was one of the 6 science fiction stories published in the first issue (April 1926) of the first magazine devoted to science fiction, Amazing Stories, edited and published by Hugo Gernsback, now considered...
The story opens on an oppressively hot day with a poor little newspaper boy, Charley, playing with a "burning glass" (a magnifying glass) which he uses to concentrate sunlight onto a small focal spot, thus intensifying...