This page brings together free online books, topic searches, and audiobooks related to short stories and story collections, including literary fiction, adventure, humor, mystery, and classic tales. The materials range from older public domain works to modern books.
The Topics section below helps readers find books within the huge Internet Archive collection. Each topic link generates an Internet Archive search focused on that subject. Browsing the topics and selecting those of interest is usually easier and more effective than searching Internet Archive directly.
Sections below Topics provide links to vintage books and audiobooks. See those sections for more information.
Topics – Library of Short Stories – Classic Short Stories
The topic links below lead to Internet Archive search results related to short stories. Each link opens a books-and-documents search focused on a particular topic.
Search results generally include fully readable books. For some subjects, Internet Archive also contains other media, such as images, audio, or video files. These can be selected from the media options above the search results. Filters on the left side of Internet Archive pages can help narrow search results by year, language, or related subjects.
Vintage – Classic Public Domain Short Stories
Vintage books were nearly always published before 1930. They can be read online or downloaded.
Public Domain Short Stories PDF – at Hathitrust in These Languages
Classic Short Stories Audiobooks Library Free
These audiobook links lead to public domain recordings from LibriVox at Internet Archive. The books recorded by Librivox volunteers were nearly all published before 1930. Recordings include story collections about Christmas, crime, ghosts, horror, humor, science fiction, and other themes.
All Librivox audiobooks are free and can be streamed online or downloaded for offline listening.
Related Pages on Century Past
See our Century Past directories for hundreds of webpages of Books; Magazines; Articles, maps, & photos; and Newspapers. You’ll find the same directories on the top Menu. Here are a few suggested pages: