For Reading Out Loud

Two masters, two stories. One by O. Henry, one by Chekhov. One comic, one melancholy. Both with a kind sympathy for the outsider in the story.

The first yuletide story of the season. Over many stories in the Father Brown saga by G. K. Chesterton, the priestly sleuth pursues the elusive master criminal Flambeau. An important turning point in their lives comes at Christmas.

Kathleen Norris’s engaging story about success and the incidental expenses. Also, in this November month, when we give thanks for abundance, a poem by Dick Ferrell about the poignant and not-so-plain beauty of this month.

Stories for a season of thanks: O. Henry’s “Two Thanksgiving Gentlemen” and selections from Jonathan Sams’ Reflections of a Fishing Parson.

A remarkable portrait of meekness and courage, Mary Freeman’s “The Revolt of ‘Mother’” is told at once with sympathy and amusement.

Mark Twain in high spirits tonight with “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” and “The Late Benjamin Franklin.”

It’s Halloween. The ideal time for Edgar Allan Poe. And so, two classic tales.

It’s Halloween. The perfect time for Edgar Allan Poe. Here are two classic tales.

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) was a soldier, newspaperman, poet, and short story writer. Settling in San Francisco, he became a journalist with Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner. So savage were his critiques of corruption and human folly that he became known as “Bitter Bierce” and “the wickedest man in San Francisco.” (He loved the tags.) Here is his most famous story, set in the Civil War.

So many stories have taken their inspiration from tonight’s tale as almost to obscure W. W. Jacob’s story, “The Monkey’s Paw.” When even The Simpsons have taken it on, it is time to refresh our acquaintance with the classic original.

“The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in his Child’s Garden of Verses. Stevenson’s versatility and range of imagination can be imagined when we consider the distance between that gentle and ever-charming volume and the thrilling, sometimes macabre stories he wrote for an older audience. Like tonight’s “The Body Snatc...

In Frank R. Stockton’s “The Widow’s Cruise,” we meet some veteran tellers of whoppers: four old salts, wholesalers of tall tales. And who tells the topper?

Far from his normal haunts in New York, the city of “The Four Million,” O. Henry spins a tale set in the American Southwest.

Two stories by a writer’s writer, Anton Chekhov.

Tonight, from Canada, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s gently humorous story, “Akin to Love.”

A beautifully observed and crafted early story by Nobel Prize-winning Italian author Grazia Deledda.

If the narrator of tonight’s story were your conversation partner, you might not get in a word edgewise: Ring Lardner’s “Golden Honeymoon.”

Tonight’s high-spirited story features a confrontation between crime fiction’s two most extraordinary minds, Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.

Two wryly observed stories by a master storyteller, who said, “It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living”: Guy de Maupassant.

In “Poor Dear Margaret Kirby,” the significance of a devastating loss is realized only much later. A wise, insightful story by Kathleen Norris (1880-1966).

Sports writer, humorist, satirist, novelist, Ring Lardner was a versatile writer with the sharpest of ears for American vernacular speech. Here is one of his great stories, “Haircut.”

Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright (1859-1945) wrote under the pen name George Egerton. Here is a modern love story, written in the Victorian age.

An unforgettable story by the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Devious courtings, wryly observed by Grazia Deledda in “The Three Brothers.”

Tonight, by kind permission of the author, Max Willi Fischer’s recent prize-winning story, “The Odd Fellow.”