Here I just want to share some good English short stories (all of them are good but some are much better than others). The difficulty of reading is, in my opinion, between high-school and undergraduate levels for Chinese students.

<aside> 📚 In my definition, an English short story is a fictional story satisfying two conditions:

1. Its length is $\leq 20$ pages of A4 paper (of course, with a readable font size).
2. It was originally written in English, i.e., it’s not a translated work.

Thus, Andersen’s tales and Kafka’s stories will never be in this collection.

</aside>

Kate Chopin

Chopin (Feb 8, 1850—Aug 22, 1904), an American author, is one of my favorite female writer over the world (another one is Eileen Chang). Her stories always focused on female life, marriage, and emotions.

Agatha Christie

Agatha (15 September 1890—12 January 1976), also called 阿婆 in China, was famous for her multiple detective fictions and short stories. Among her works, the first one I read is Sleeping Murder. After that, I immediately lost my heart to her writing, as of now.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Lovecraft (August 20, 1890—March 15, 1937), an American author, was well-known for his creation of the Cthulhu Mythos. A lot of his works can be read for free on The H. P. Lovecraft Archive.

Roald Dhal

Dahl (September 13, 1916—November 23, 1990) was a British author of children’s literature and short stories. I first knew him when my best friend, Lydia Wang, was writing her dissertation which discussed the scary aesthetics in Dahl’s The Witches (1983).

Edgar Allan Poe

Poe (January 19, 1809—October 7, 1849) was an American poet, author, and literary critic, and he is particularly famous for his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is considered the pioneer of the modern detective literature due to his The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841).

Other Horror & Thriller

Marriage? Love?