Short & Sweet Past Readings

2025

    • Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel”
    • Zora Neale Hurston, “Sweat”
    • Dorothy West, “The Typewriter”
    • V.S. Pritchett, “Blind Love”
    • Christopher Tilghman, “In a Father’s Place”
    • Anton Chekhov, “Gooseberries”
    • Virginia Woolf, “The Mark on the Wall”
    • Jonathan Franzen, “Agreeable”
    • M.R. James, “Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”

2024

    • Claire Keegan, “So Late in the Day”
    • Willa Cather, “The Bohemian Girl”
    • Diane Oliver, “Neighbors” from What So Proudly we Hail
    • James Baldwin, “The Outing”
    • Alice Munro, “Queenie”
    • Joyce Carol Oates, “Late Love”
    • Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People”
    • Susan Glaspell, “A Jury of Her Peers”
    • John Cheever, “The Swimmer”

2023

    • Willa Cather, “The Sentimentality of William Tavener”

    • Eudora Welty, “A Worn Path”

    • Dorothy Parker, “A Telephone Call”

    • Octavia Butler, “Bloodchild”

    • Allegra Goodman, “A Challenge You Have Overcome”

    • Te-Ping Chen, “Shanghai Murmur”

    • Richard Ford, “Sweethearts”

2022

    • Henry James, “The Aspern Papers”

    • Leo Tolstoy, “God Sees the Truth, but Waits”

    • NoViolet Bulawayo, “Hitting Budapest”

    • Shirley Jackson, “Charles”

    • Ring Lardner, “Haircut”

    • David Szalay, “Turbulence”

    • Ernest Hemingway, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”

    • Lorrie Moore, “You’re Ugly, Too”

    • Edith Wharton, “The Pelican”

2021

    • Octavia E. Butler, “Speech Sounds”

    • Graham Swift, “Blushes”

    • Anton Chekhov, “Darling”

    • Robert Frost, “The Question of a Feather”

    • Ernest Hemingway, “In Another Country”

    • Bryan Washington, “Katy”

    • Elizabeth Spencer, “A Southern Landscape”

    • Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery”

    • Tony Earley, “The Place of Safety”

    • Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart”

2020

    • Kate Chopin, “Story of an Hour”
    • Guy de Maupassant, “The Diamond Necklace”
    • Mark Twain, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”
    • Stig Dagerman, “To Kill a Child”
    • Katherine Mansfield, “The Garden Party”
    • O. Henry, “The Gift of the Magi” and “The Cop and the Anthem”
    • Ben Lerner, “The Media”
    • James Joyce, “The Boarding House” from The Dubliners
    • Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog”
    • Nadezhda Teffi, “Family and Others”
    • David Hewson, “The Bad Apple”
    • Isak Dinesen, “Babette’s Feast”
    • Alice Walker, “Everyday Use”
    • Clarice Lispector, “Love (Amor)”
    • Alice Munro, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”

    • Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Third and Final Continent”

    • Shirley Hazzard, “Villa Adriana” from Cliffs of Fall

    • Edith Wharton, “The Muse’s Tragedy”

    • Tim O’Brien, “The Things They Carried”

    • Savyon Liebrecht, “Apples from the Desert”