LitReading - Short Stories and Timeless Tales

Short StoryVerses
Short StoryVerses

LitReading: Great Short Stories Read Aloud Great stories deserve to be heard. LitReading brings you a complete short stories, unabridged and narrated by veteran broadcaster and voice actor Don McDonald. Hear the masters of the form, including Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, O. Henry, Edith Wharton, Anton Chekhov, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Katherine Mansfield, Stephen Crane, Saki, Bret Harte and Virginia Woolf. Along with them come overlooked gems from the golden age of American, British and Russian literature that deserve a second hearing. Each episode is one full story, from a few minutes to a deeply immersive hour. Think of it as a free audiobook of short fiction, performed with warmth and clarity and just enough character to bring every voice to life. Play it on a commute, a walk or a quiet evening. It also makes good bedtime listening for grown-ups. Come for a story. Leave with a world. Help a good story travel. If LitReading has kept you company, tap Follow in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. It's free, and new stories arrive automatically. A quick 5-star rating or a one-line review helps more than you'd guess, because that's how new listeners find us. And if a story stayed with you, send this episode to one friend who loves to read. That's how this show grows. LitReading is part of Short Storyverses (shortstoryverses.com), a family of podcasts for people who love great storytelling: New Tales Told: original stories in the spirit of the classicsFRIGHTLY!: tales of terror and the uncannySci-Finds: science fiction and speculative storiesHumorUs: comic fictionSeason's Readings: holiday stories for any time of yearReadastorus: stories for younger listenersSearch for any of them wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  1. 9m ago

    The Good and the Bad Little Boy by Mark Twain — Virtue Is Punished and Mischief Rewarded

    Mark Twain had a bone to pick with the Sunday-school storybook — that pious little genre where good children are showered with rewards and bad children are struck by lightning, broken by apple trees, and buried under weeping relatives by the final page. So he wrote two stories to set the record straight. In this paired episode we run both, back-to-back, framed like an old-time radio hour. First, The Story of the Good Little Boy: meet Jacob Blivens, who obeys his parents, learns his book, never plays hooky, and longs above all else to be printed in a Sunday-school book of his own — funeral illustration and all. There is only one small problem. The world has not read the same books Jacob has, and it declines, spectacularly, to cooperate. Then, in counterpoint, The Story of the Bad Little Boy: meet Jim — not "James," though the books would prefer it — who steals the jam, robs the orchard, frames the good boy, boats on Sunday without drowning, and grows up to prosper by every kind of rascality. His luck, like Jacob's misfortune, never quite runs out. Twain's targets are sentimentality, easy moralizing, and the comfortable lie that the universe keeps a fair ledger. Told with a wink and a warm lamp, this is satire that still lands a century and a half on. Be good if it suits you. Be careful regardless. This is a episode from our archives recently remastered. If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald or take a no cost path: Follow the podcast so you never miss one and if you enjoyed this story, a five-star rating or review helps others find us. Think of it as applause without waking anyone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    The Good and the Bad Little Boy by Mark Twain — Virtue Is Punished and Mischief Rewarded

  2. 1d ago

    Memoirs of a Yellow Dog by O. Henry — A Dog and His Master Escape an Unhappy Home

    O. Henry usually saves his surprises for the last line. This time he starts with one: the narrator is a dog. In The Memoirs of a Yellow Dog, a mangy, good-natured mutt gives us his candid review of apartment life, married humans, and the fine art of knowing when it's time to go. Wry, tender, and very funny — it's a small classic told from just below the dinner table. Few writers could make a stray dog sound this much like a philosopher. O. Henry's yellow dog sees his humans clearly, loves them anyway, and still knows a good exit when he smells one. It's humor with a soft heart underneath. This is a episode from our archives recently remastered. If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald or take a no cost path: Follow the podcast so you never miss one and if you enjoyed this story, a five-star rating or review helps others find us. Think of it as applause without waking anyone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Memoirs of a Yellow Dog by O. Henry — A Dog and His Master Escape an Unhappy Home

  3. 2d ago

    Final Shift by Don McDonald — The Day the Universe Caught Up

    Eli has spent thirty years a mile under Lead, South Dakota, in an old gold mine turned physics lab, catching neutrinos, the ghost particles that pass through everything. On an ordinary Tuesday he's alone on a rubber raft inside the Well, a steel tank lined with eleven thousand golden sensors, when the water lights up. Up top, the whole world felt something. Below, the cage has stopped. And the only instrument on Earth that saw it is his. An original story written and read by Don McDonald. If you enjoy short fiction, please follow Litreading. If you like the story, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald or take a no cost path: Follow the podcast so you never miss one and if you enjoyed this story, a five-star rating or review helps others find us. Think of it as applause without waking anyone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Final Shift by Don McDonald — The Day the Universe Caught Up

  4. 2d ago

    The Great American Pie Company by Ellis Parker Butler — A Pie Company Finds a Recipe for Endless Profit

    Eph Deacon sells pies for a living, or rather his wife bakes them and he carries the basket, which suits his philosophy just fine. Then Phineas Doolittle starts undercutting him from across the river, and what begins as a squabble on a bridge turns into something much bigger, and much sillier. Before long the two men have talked themselves into buying up farms, bakeries, and even a railroad, all in the name of cornering the pie market once and for all. Ellis Parker Butler, the man who gave the world "Pigs Is Pigs," turns small-town rivalry into an empire of hot air, one slice at a time. Ellis Parker Butler was an Iowa-born humorist who wrote more than two thousand stories, essays, and poems over a career spanning four decades, though he never quite escaped the shadow of his most famous creation, "Pigs Is Pigs." Published in 1904, "The Great American Pie Company" shows off the same gift for watching ordinary ambition curdle into absurdity, set against the folksy backdrop of a small Midwestern town not unlike the one Butler grew up in. This is a episode from our archives recently remastered. If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald or take a no cost path: Follow the podcast so you never miss one and if you enjoyed this story, a five-star rating or review helps others find us. Think of it as applause without waking anyone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    The Great American Pie Company by Ellis Parker Butler — A Pie Company Finds a Recipe for Endless Profit

  5. 3d ago

    My Financial Career by Stephen Leacock — A Nervous Man Tries to Open a Bank Account

    He only wants to open an account. That's all. Fifty-six dollars, a polite request, and maybe two minutes of a bank manager's time. But the moment our narrator steps inside the building, something happens to his brain, and every word that comes out of his mouth makes the situation worse. Stephen Leacock built an entire career on watching ordinary people crumble under ordinary pressure, and few pieces do it faster, or funnier, than this one. Stephen Leacock was a Canadian economist, political scientist, and, by wide agreement, the funniest English-speaking writer of the early twentieth century, with Mark Twain among those who said so. Drawing on his own academic training, Leacock had a particular gift for turning institutions, banks, universities, small towns, into stages for quiet human panic, and "My Financial Career," first published in 1910, remains one of the sharpest few minutes of comic writing he ever produced. This is a episode from our archives recently remastered. If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald or take a no cost path: Follow the podcast so you never miss one and if you enjoyed this story, a five-star rating or review helps others find us. Think of it as applause without waking anyone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    My Financial Career by Stephen Leacock — A Nervous Man Tries to Open a Bank Account

  6. 4d ago

    The Million Pound Bank Note by Mark Twain — A Penniless Man Is Handed a Million-Pound Note

    Henry Adams has one dollar to his name, a coat gone thin at the elbows, and a hunger that's stopped being polite about it. Then two rich old brothers hand him an envelope and vanish for thirty days, leaving him holding the single strangest piece of paper in London. It isn't counterfeit. It isn't a joke. And it is worth more than Henry can spend, prove, or even safely admit to owning. Mark Twain turns a penniless clerk loose on Victorian high society and lets the absurdity do exactly what it wants. Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, remains one of America's sharpest satirists, a writer who could turn a tall tale into a mirror held up to an entire society. Published in 1893, "The £1,000,000 Bank-Note" takes his gift for skewering wealth and appearances and sets it loose on Victorian London, decades before Hollywood borrowed the premise more than once. This is a episode from our archives recently remastered. If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald or take a no cost path: Follow the podcast so you never miss one and if you enjoyed this story, a five-star rating or review helps others find us. Think of it as applause without waking anyone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    The Million Pound Bank Note by Mark Twain — A Penniless Man Is Handed a Million-Pound Note

  7. 5d ago

    Nevada Funeral: Scotty Briggs and the Clergyman by Mark Twain — A Frontier Funeral Goes Spectacularly Off Script

    Out in the Nevada mining camps of the 1870s, men learned to speak a language all their own, part slang, part swagger, part pure invention, and woe to the outsider who couldn't keep up. When a rough-hewn miner named Scotty Briggs marches into town to fetch a proper burial for a fallen friend, he finds himself face to face with a young, freshly minted clergyman who speaks only the King's English, and neither man has the faintest idea what the other is talking about. What follows is one of Mark Twain's funniest, and strangely most tender, character sketches, a collision of two American dialects, two worlds, and two men who, despite everything, manage to understand each other where it counts. Before he was Mark Twain, he was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, a Missouri riverboat pilot who traded the Mississippi for the Nevada silver fields and, when the mining didn't pan out, picked up a pen instead of a pickaxe. He spent the 1860s knocking around the boomtowns of the Comstock Lode, filing dispatches for the Territorial Enterprise under a borrowed riverboat term, a leadsman's call meaning safe water, two fathoms deep. The camps he covered, and the characters who populated them, miners, con men, preachers, and everyone in between, gave him a lifetime's worth of material and an ear for the peculiar poetry of American speech. He'd go on to write the books that made him famous, but the West made him a writer first. This is a episode from our archives recently remastered. If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald or take a no cost path: Follow the podcast so you never miss one and if you enjoyed this story, a five-star rating or review helps others find us. Think of it as applause without waking anyone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Nevada Funeral: Scotty Briggs and the Clergyman by Mark Twain — A Frontier Funeral Goes Spectacularly Off Script

  8. 6d ago

    Eve’s Diary by Mark Twain — The First Woman Explains Love, Beauty and Adam

    Where Adam's diary gave us one grumpy, bewildered account of those first days in Eden, Twain gives Eve her own version, and it changes everything. She's curious about everything, endlessly talkative, and cheerfully certain she's right about most of it. It's Twain at his funniest, and, by the end, at his most tender. This one will surprise you. Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, remains one of America's most enduring literary voices, celebrated for wit as sharp as his social criticism. Eve's Diary stands apart in his body of work, a companion piece to Extracts from Adam's Diary that reveals a gentler, more affectionate side of a writer usually known for satire. Twain wrote it, in part, as a tribute to his own wife, Olivia. This is a episode from our archives recently remastered. If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald or take a no cost path: Follow the podcast so you never miss one and if you enjoyed this story, a five-star rating or review helps others find us. Think of it as applause without waking anyone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Eve’s Diary by Mark Twain — The First Woman Explains Love, Beauty and Adam
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LitReading: Great Short Stories Read Aloud Great stories deserve to be heard. LitReading brings you a complete short stories, unabridged and narrated by veteran broadcaster and voice actor Don McDonald. Hear the masters of the form, including Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, O. Henry, Edith Wharton, Anton Chekhov, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Katherine Mansfield, Stephen Crane, Saki, Bret Harte and Virginia Woolf. Along with them come overlooked gems from the golden age of American, British and Russian literature that deserve a second hearing. Each episode is one full story, from a few minutes to a deeply immersive hour. Think of it as a free audiobook of short fiction, performed with warmth and clarity and just enough character to bring every voice to life. Play it on a commute, a walk or a quiet evening. It also makes good bedtime listening for grown-ups. Come for a story. Leave with a world. Help a good story travel. If LitReading has kept you company, tap Follow in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. It's free, and new stories arrive automatically. A quick 5-star rating or a one-line review helps more than you'd guess, because that's how new listeners find us. And if a story stayed with you, send this episode to one friend who loves to read. That's how this show grows. LitReading is part of Short Storyverses (shortstoryverses.com), a family of podcasts for people who love great storytelling: New Tales Told: original stories in the spirit of the classicsFRIGHTLY!: tales of terror and the uncannySci-Finds: science fiction and speculative storiesHumorUs: comic fictionSeason's Readings: holiday stories for any time of yearReadastorus: stories for younger listenersSearch for any of them wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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