LitReading - Classic Short Stories and Timeless Tales

Poker Flat is a mining camp that has recently decided to take its virtue seriously. When the town's new moral committee finishes its business, four of its most familiar faces find themselves traveling a mountain trail with strangers who know far too much about one another's pasts. Among them is a gambler whose quiet confidence suggests he has already calculated every card that has not yet been dealt.

Bret Harte's classic American story unfolds where the Sierra Nevada meets the law of unexpected consequences. In the company of strangers, with old judgments left behind in the valley below, the outcasts of Poker Flat discover that the line between sinner and saint is rarely where the town's respectable citizens believe it to be. A timeless tale about the hands we are dealt, the hands we play, and the surprising hands we never see coming.
We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks.

Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com

If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book!
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald
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This is not a story.

After dozens of episodes, I thought I'd take one to explain myself. Who I am, why LitReading exists, how a story earns a place here, and why there are suddenly so many related shows sharing the same shelf. Also a few honest words about advertising, a tip jar I'd rather call Buy Me a Book, a request for a review, and a listener who found my narration unlistenable.

Don's Money podcast is Talking Real Money
We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks.

Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com

If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book!
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Arnold Thorndike buys a Correggio before breakfast and can price his own time to the minute. Two hundred dollars of it. So when he stops his car at the Court of General Sessions to say a word for a young stenographer who got drunk, lost five hundred dollars of his employer's money, and is due up for sentence, he figures the errand will run him about a thousand.

The court has other ideas. Richard Harding Davis, the most famous reporter of his generation, sets the Wisest Man in Wall Street down on a hard oak chair and leaves him there, unrecognized and unimportant, admitted only because he's "with Mr. Andrews," while the whole sorry parade of the city files past the bench.

This is a comedy of manners with a soft heart.

If you enjoy well-narrated short stories, check out our many story-telling podcasts at shortstoryverses.com

We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks.

Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com

If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book!
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

High summer, and it is too hot to sing. A huntsman walks a road with a gun on his shoulder, a bird in his bag, and a dog running ahead of him. A woman steps out of the rye with a sickle in her hand and says his name. She is delighted to see him. He is not.

They sit down between two fir trees, and in the ten minutes that follow, Anton Chekhov does something very quiet and very cruel. He was twenty-five, writing fast and for money under a pen name, and he claimed later that he wrote this one in a bathhouse in a single sitting
We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks.

Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com

If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book!
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This story is the first story specifically written for HumorUs Stories, a funny story podcast from ShortStoryverses.com.

In Maple Glen, nothing ever happens. This week, nothing happens in three separate backyards, after dark, and everyone involved would prefer you didn't ask.
A deadpan comedy about honesty, neighbors, and one very patient dog.

Find more stories at ShortStoryverses.com — a multiverse of audio fiction spanning seven shows: classics on LitReading, original voices on New Tales Told, children's stories on Readastorus, holiday tales on Season's Readings, horror on FRIGHTLY!, romance on Love Lit, and comedy on HumorUs. Every story sized to fit a commute, a walk, or the quiet stretch before sleep. We have stories buried everywhere.
We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks.

Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com

If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book!
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.