Easy English stories
Fourteen famous short stories, short enough to finish in one sitting. Easy here means short and clear, not simplified: every story is printed as its writer wrote it, and no two are by the same person.
Up to here every story on this site was collected rather than written: fables, fairy tales, folk tales, told by nobody in particular. On this shelf every story has somebody who wrote it.
That is the whole design. If Saki is too dry for you, the next story is Chopin and sounds nothing like him. You do not have to leave the level to find a voice you get on with, and learning which writers you like is most of what reading is for.
The original text, every time. These stories are printed here as their writers wrote them, long out of copyright and hosted by us. That makes them harder than the shelves below, so some carry an easy version in simple English underneath: that part is written by readClassicly and says so. Read the easy one first if you need to. The story is always the writer’s.
14 stories, 14 writers
Shortest first. About 31,239 words in all, by fourteen different writers.
This shelf is complete
Fourteen stories, one per writer, as planned: Saki, Chopin, Wilde, Kipling, O. Henry, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Mansfield, Twain, Poe, Stockton, W. W. Jacobs, Maupassant and Jack London. When you have read enough of them, the rung above holds nine longer tales that no longer fit into one sitting.
Nothing on this shelf repeats a text from any other shelf on the site, and nothing ever will: a script checks it.
Where this shelf sits
This is the second rung. Below it are the beginner shelves, which are shorter and simpler; above it are longer books.
About 45,000 words of reading at this level is where words start repeating often enough to stick. That is a floor rather than a limit: its 1 shelves hold 31,239, and reading all of them is a perfectly good idea.
Long tales: a tale that takes more than one sitting, but is still one story. It is open whenever you are ready.
Go up to Long tales