Interactive Study Guides

A collection of Middle Eastern folk tales compiled over centuries, also known as One Thousand and One Nights.

Two boyhood friends kept a twenty-year promise — one as a wanted criminal, one as the cop who couldn't arrest him

Test your knowledge of "The Aged Mother" by Matsuo Basho with this interactive study guide featuring questions about the story's themes of filial devotion, the conflict between duty and love, and the wisdom of the elderly.

Nine-year-old children on rainy Venus lock a classmate in a closet on the one day in seven years when the sun comes out

A stranded spaceman must stay awake for six days or ancient warring spirits will destroy his mind

"I would prefer not to" - the enigmatic clerk whose passive resistance confounds Wall Street

Tiny warriors, epic stakes: Thoreau watches red and black ants fight to the death — and sees all of human history reflected in the woodpile.

A mysterious slave ship harbors dark secrets in this tale of deception and power

A banker and a lawyer wager fifteen years and two million rubles on a single impulsive argument — only one of them understands what was truly at stake

A scientist's obsession with perfection destroys the wife he loves in this allegory of hubris

A man watches himself become a monster — and his own cat will seal his fate from behind a cellar wall

A paranoid Swede arrives in Nebraska certain he'll be murdered — and his fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy

Civil War veteran turned master of dark irony and psychological horror.

Ten respectable passengers in a wartime stagecoach gladly eat a despised woman's food — then spend two days pressuring her to sacrifice herself so they can go home.

A cadet drops his bayonet in front of all of Washington — and the humiliation that nearly breaks him becomes the proudest moment of his life

A tailor kills seven flies, stitches the boast on his belt, and lets the world's misreading carry him all the way to a kingdom

German folklorists who collected and published some of the world's most beloved fairy tales.

German folklorists who collected and published some of the world's most beloved fairy tales.

A Civil War nurse discovers that the dying Union soldier and the Confederate prisoner she tends are half-brothers — one Black, one white — bound by slavery's cruelest legacy

American author of cosmic horror and weird fiction, whose vision of a vast, indifferent universe reshaped the horror genre.

A nobleman lures his rival into the family catacombs with the promise of rare wine — and walling him up alive fifty years ago is the least disturbing part of the story

An American wife at an Italian hotel wants a cat in the rain — and far more than any cat can give

A compulsive gambler's champion frog is secretly loaded with quail shot — and the joke is on everyone, including the reader

A police superintendent delivers five contradictory verdicts over one dog bite — his position shifts with every rumor about who might own the animal

A deaf-mute boy wanders a Civil War battlefield mistaking crawling, dying soldiers for playmates — then follows the red light home

A lonely teacher in a rough frontier town brings Christmas spirit to children who have never celebrated it

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, German scholars who collected and published some of the world's most enduring fairy tales and folklore.

A meteorite poisons a Massachusetts farm with an alien presence that has no name, no motive, and no mercy

A homeless man's elaborate schemes to get arrested for the winter all backfire — until the one moment he stops trying

Union soldier turned writer, master of Civil War realism and bitter, ironic storytelling.

Jazz Age novelist and short story writer, author of The Great Gatsby, whose work captured the glamour and disillusionment of 1920s America.

A shipwrecked sailor adrift on the exposed ocean floor discovers a monolith older than humanity — and the thing that worships it

An invisible creature stalks a California hillside — and the coroner's inquest buries the only evidence that could explain it

American Naturalist, war correspondent, and author of The Red Badge of Courage, who wrote some of his most powerful work before dying of tuberculosis at just twenty-eight.

A grieving son and daughter read their sainted mother's old letters — and discover the secret she carried to her grave.

A Louisiana planter drives away his innocent wife over their baby's appearance — then finds a letter that destroys him

Jazz Age novelist and chronicler of the American Dream's dark side, best known for The Great Gatsby.

Four elderly friends drink from the Fountain of Youth — and learn nothing at all

A sorcerer's plan to open a gate for ancient gods produces one son who looks almost human — and one who does not

A father's desperate, absurd attempts to entertain customers with eggs go horribly, hilariously wrong

A poor shoemaker cuts his last scrap of leather before bed — and wakes each morning to find shoes so perfect they sell themselves

A vain emperor parades naked through town while everyone pretends to admire his magnificent suit

A man reads a book and becomes convinced its characters are aliens — a playful exercise in literal reading

A village plagued by Hell-sent dreams sends a young hero to forge a legendary sword from a dragon’s spine and storm a fortress that cannot be taken except by the blade Sacnoth

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, German scholars who collected and published some of the world's most enduring fairy tales and folklore.

A scrappy newspaper office boy cracks a murder case and outruns every reporter in town

A timeless tale of love and sacrifice at Christmas

A merchant wrongly imprisoned for murder spends twenty-six years in Siberia — then the real killer walks into the same prison camp

A boy his family calls a fool shares his last crust with a stranger — and ends up with a golden goose, a princess who finally laughs, and a kingdom

A family road trip becomes a meditation on grace and violence

A meddling busybody's gossip threatens to tear a quiet community apart — until the truth comes out

A man notices a body hanging in the town square — and realizes he is the only one who finds it strange

German academics and folklorists whose collected fairy tales became the most influential body of folklore in Western literature.

A golden statue gives away his ruby, his sapphire eyes, and his gold leaf — until nothing remains but a broken lead heart the city throws away

A hare mocks a hedgehog's crooked legs — so the hedgehog sets a race he cannot possibly lose and lets pride run the hare to death

In 2081, the government finally achieves perfect equality — by handicapping everyone who is too smart, too strong, or too beautiful

A medical student injects fresh corpses with his reanimating solution — and across seventeen years, the failures come back

A conversation about everything and nothing - Hemingway's masterpiece of subtext

A knight devises the cleverest plan ever conceived to steal a legendary treasure — the Gibbelins have heard that before

A Normandy gentleman begins a diary in perfect health — and ends it outside his burning house, wondering whether he must kill himself

Union veteran and master of dark irony who wrote unflinching stories about war's moral costs.

A confidently wrong newspaper editor rewrites agricultural journalism — with spectacular, hilarious results

Mark Twain explains why the humorous story is the hardest art in the world — then proves it with a ghost story and a perfectly timed pause

A boy who worships racehorses discovers that his hero is not who he seemed

A dreamlike voyage down a magical river past sleeping cities and forgotten gods — toward the pink cliffs at the edge of the world

A doctor rows his young son across a dark lake to deliver a baby — and discovers that birth and death have been sharing the same bunk all night

Two feuding landowners trapped under a fallen tree discover something worse than each other

A mysterious beacon burns each night in a ruined Welsh tower — and the girl who tends it has been hiding there, waiting, since the night love and class prejudice drove her from her only home

Two women discover the evidence the men missed — and silently decide a murder case on their own terms

Two hired killers walk into a small-town diner — and the man they've come to murder already knows there's nothing to be done

An old painter who never finished his masterpiece braves a freezing rainstorm to give a dying woman one more reason to live

An old man left by his tribe to die in the snow confronts the one law that spares no one

A Union major’s last letter to his wife, written one week before he died at Bull Run — love and duty in irreconcilable collision

A traveling salesman's pitch becomes a confrontation between faith and fear

German folklorists who collected and published some of the world's most beloved fairy tales.

A magic mirror that speaks only truth, a wicked queen who cannot accept its answer, and a girl who survives three murder attempts — only to be felled by a beautiful apple

A shocking tradition in a small town

The delicate Missouri boy who nearly drowned three times, ran away on a steamboat, and grew up to sign his books 'Mark Twain'

A crash-landed astronaut and a birdlike Martian face strange worlds together — and discover the limits of understanding

A prince seals himself inside a fortress to escape a deadly plague — then discovers that Death was already inside, waiting

A village minister dons a black veil and never removes it — a parable of secret sin and isolation

Be careful what you wish for in this classic horror tale

An alchemist's apprentice drinks the Elixir of Immortality by accident — and spends three centuries watching everyone he loves die

A big-game hunter becomes the prey on a remote island — the ultimate survival thriller

Two women found dead in a sealed Paris apartment, a killer no one can identify, and an amateur detective who changes crime fiction forever

A young man's night of searching ends in a haunting discovery — and a laugh he cannot take back

A story of pride, appearances, and ironic revelation

A Czech immigrant farmer reflects on what makes a good life in rural Nebraska

A Nightingale sacrifices her life to create a red rose for a Student who throws it in the gutter and goes back to his books

A condemned man's escape - or is it? A masterpiece of time and reality

One man refuses to pay a tax, spends a night in jail, and writes an idea that reshapes the world

Journalist and novelist whose brief life produced two American classics — The Red Badge of Courage and this story.

A fifteen-year-old girl tells a nervous stranger the most convincing ghost story he has ever heard — every word of it a lie

A solitary creature escapes his dark castle at last — only to discover, at the end of a gilded mirror, what he truly is

A mother gets fifteen unexpected dollars and, for one luminous afternoon, remembers who she was before duty consumed her

A one-legged cattle rustler's final gamble on the Texas frontier

A sensitive boy escapes his dreary Pittsburgh life for a brief taste of luxury in New York

An inventor sealed inside his own creation swings through centuries — the cruelest time travel story ever told

An inventor sealed inside his own creation swings through centuries — the cruelest time travel story ever told

An aging boxer faces a young challenger with nothing left but experience — and an empty stomach

An unnamed prisoner condemned by the Spanish Inquisition faces three escalating death traps — a bottomless pit, a razor pendulum, and closing iron walls — with only his mind as a weapon

A stolen letter gives a scheming minister blackmail power over a royal personage — and the Paris police have searched his apartment for months without finding it. Dupin looks for it in an afternoon.

Cowboys negotiate a high-stakes prisoner exchange on the Texas-Mexico borderlands

Two hapless kidnappers discover their ten-year-old captive is more trouble than he is worth in this classic American comedy of reversed fortunes.

A young woman raised among poisonous flowers becomes the deadliest experiment of all

German folklorists who collected and published some of the world's most beloved fairy tales.

A psychiatrist uncovers a sinister scheme that exploits humanity's deepest fear — of rats

American author of horror, cosmic dread, and the supernatural, whose Cthulhu Mythos transformed 20th-century horror fiction.

A journalist shipwrecked on a remote island talks his way into becoming its ruler

A miller's lie traps his daughter in a room full of straw — spin it into gold by morning or die — and the only help available costs more than she ever imagined

A bored, world-weary young man is rescued from his aristocratic tomb of a life by a woman in red stockings who refuses to be impressed by him

Autonomous weapons evolve beyond their creators in this chilling post-apocalyptic tale

A Giant walls off his beautiful garden from the children — and winter moves in and refuses to leave until love tears the wall down

A Republican sniper wins a deadly rooftop duel during the Irish Civil War — then crosses the street to see who he has killed

A girl's epic journey through enchanted lands to rescue her best friend from the grip of eternal ice

A dying writer tallies every story he never wrote — and every experience he traded for comfort

A young man returns from the Great War to find his Oklahoma town has already moved on — and that lying is the only way anyone will listen

A sickly boy invents a ferret-god in the garden shed and prays for his guardian's death — the ferret obliges

Two former sweethearts, a darkened house, and a thunderstorm that gives everyone — including the innocent — exactly what they need

A thirteen-year-old Inuit boy outwits the village hunters with a secret no one sees coming

A longhorn steer won in a card game becomes the most famous animal on the cattle trail

An hour of forbidden freedom and a shocking reversal

A city defended only by the legend of dead heroes — until a sleeping boy and a ghost must save it

A murderer's descent into madness - or is it guilt? A masterpiece of psychological horror

A would-be purse-snatcher meets his match — and his unexpected second chance

A Yukon dog so worthless, so unkillable, and so impossible to abandon that he becomes legend

Seventy-five degrees below zero, one match, and no margin for error — man against the Yukon cold

A scientist teaches a cat to speak English — and the cat immediately begins repeating every secret the guests thought they were keeping

A vain young nobleman trades his handsome body to a hideous dwarf for a chest of gold — and discovers that beauty without virtue is the worst bargain of all

Two Parisian fishermen sneak through the front lines for one last quiet day at the river -- and discover that war has no patience for innocence.

A Chinese immigrant mother's dreams for her daughter and a piano that carries years of silence — then becomes an unexpected bridge

A misfit bird endures cruelty and loneliness before discovering his true, magnificent nature

A stubborn family feud melts away over a New Year's dinner that almost didn't happen

American realist and war correspondent who wrote The Red Badge of Courage at age twenty-three, then spent much of his short life reporting from real battlefields.

A Nebraska homesteader returns to Boston for a concert, stirring memories of her former life

A philosopher sets out for a daily walk and returns with an argument that wildness is the only thing keeping the world alive

A young heiress discovers her guardian uncle's terrifying plan to steal her fortune — and the asylum he's prepared to silence her

Voice of the Jazz Age, chronicler of wealth, desire, and the American Dream’s seductive failure.

A Puritan man's night in the forest destroys his faith in everyone he has ever trusted

Children play the most exciting game ever — 'Invasion' — while their parents laugh. The parents are wrong.

A courteous gentleman named Death pulls up in a carriage — and the speaker finds herself unable to refuse the ride

A British soldier marches across South Africa until the boots ahead of him are all that remains of his mind

A small, tireless bird perches in the soul and sings through every storm without ever asking anything in return

A wry eight-line declaration that mocks fame, celebrates obscurity, and turns anonymity into a secret shared between just two nobodies

A traveller finds two broken legs of a stone colossus in the desert — the rest is sand, and a boast that time has made absurd

Nevermore echoes through this haunting poem of grief and madness

A literary movement exploring sin, guilt, and the darkness lurking beneath human virtue

Tales of terror, crumbling castles, and psychological horror that haunt the imagination