Short stories | Lecturia

Mary Shelley: The Invisible Girl

Mary Shelley’s short story “The Invisible Girl” tells the adventure of a traveler who, disoriented during a storm, finds refuge in a seemingly abandoned and ruined tower. Inside, he discovers a surprisingly cozy atmosphere and an enigmatic portrait of a young woman called “The Invisible Girl.” Intrigued by the place, the man asks a local woman for more information about it. The woman reveals a story of love, pain, and mystery, which connects a series of characters and explains the reason for such a peculiar construction. “The Invisible Girl” is a work in which the author of Frankenstein mixes the gothic with the romantic to deliver a tragic and moving story.

Philip K. Dick: Colony

Major Lawrence Hall bent over the binocular microscope, correcting the fine adjustment. “Interesting,” he murmured. “Isn’t it? Three weeks on this planet and we’ve yet to find a harmful life form.” Lieutenant Friendly sat down on the edge of the lab table, avoiding the culture bowls. “What kind of place is this? No disease germs, … Read more

Edgar Allan Poe: Berenice

Dicebant mihi sodales, si sepulchrum amicae visitarem,curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas.—Ebn Zaiat MISERY is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch,—as distinct too, yet as intimately blended. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow! How is it that … Read more

Flannery O’Connor: A Good Man Is Hard to Find

Flannery O'Connor - Un hombre bueno es difícil de encontrar

The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the … Read more

Raymond Carver: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

MY friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right. The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin. Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink. There were Mel and me and his second wife, Teresa—Terri, we called her—and my wife, … Read more

Edgar Allan Poe: The Pit and the Pendulum

Impia tortorum longos hic turba furoresSanguinis innocui, non satiata, aluit.Sospite nunc patria, fracto nunc funeris antro,Mors ubi dira fuit vita salusque patent. [Quatrain composed for the gates of a market to be erected upon the site of the Jacobin Club House at Paris.] I was sick—sick unto death with that long agony; and when they … Read more