Classic short stories, as they were written
Up to here every story was collected: fables, fairy tales, folk tales, told by nobody in particular. On this shelf every story has somebody who wrote it, and no two are by the same person.
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, copied from Project Gutenberg 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.
5 stories, 5 writers
Shortest first. About 11,159 words so far, and growing toward fourteen.
This shelf is still being built
Fourteen stories are planned, one per writer. Tolstoy, Chekhov, Poe, O. Henry, Mark Twain, Maupassant, Andersen, Washington Irving, Frank Stockton and Hawthorne are still to come. They are written one at a time and appear here as they are finished.
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 11,159, 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 being built. There is more than enough at this level to be going on with in the meantime.