Read The Lottery

Ichabod Crane rides home past the churchyard and meets the Headless Horseman; the first American ghost story.

A murderer insists on his own sanity while the old man's heartbeat gets louder under the floorboards.

A woman shut in a nursery for a rest cure starts reading the wallpaper and finds a figure creeping behind the pattern.

Three wishes on a mummified paw, and the knocking at the door after the second one.

An officer demonstrates the machine that writes a condemned man's sentence into his back over twelve hours.

The twelve Strand stories, A Scandal in Bohemia to The Copper Beeches.

Ten young Florentines tell a hundred stories while the plague rages; the first modern prose.

Scheherazade keeps herself alive with Sinbad, Aladdin and Ali Baba, a story a night.