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126 Short Stories / Books That You Can Read In A Sitting, Maybe Two

126 Short Stories / Books That You Can Read In A Sitting, Maybe Two
The definition of short stories is quite subjective, but some would say that it should remain below 7,000 words in order to be considered as one. They also can be as short as only one sentence which also known as flash fiction. Facing limitations, authors have to creatively squeeze and balance among the four of the most popular elements that really make a story stand out – character, plot, setting, and tension. Nonetheless, some authors simply love writing in this category and find the challenge of creating a story with constricted word count fun.

Regardless of your reading objectives, whether its quality or quantity, this list represents a guide in which you can find stories that you can finish in a sitting, maybe two. The titles that you find here range from 41 pages to 369 pages long. To those who wish to take a break from a previous long-read or just to steer towards a different reading style, we hope you sit down to read these stories, maybe after a bit of gardening, maybe while lying in the bed lazying around, as the sun is setting down or when it’s rising. After finishing one or a couple, that should spur you to try to read dozens more.

126 Short Stories / Books That You Can Read In A Sitting

  1. The Little Sisters of Eluria by Stephen King – (41 pages)
  2. The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster – (48 pages)
  3. The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell – (48 pages)
  4. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka – (51 pages)
  5. Really BAD Poetry by Irving T. Duck – (54 pages)
  6. Wool by Hugh Howey – (58 pages)
  7. 1000 Lashes: Because I Say What I Think by Raif Badawi – (60 pages)
  8. Larkspur, or A Necromancer’s Romance by V. M. Jaskiernia – (60 pages)
  9. Blasted by Sarah Kane – (61 pages)
  10. The Grownup by Gillian Flynn – (64 pages)
  11. Anthem by Ayn Rand – (66 pages)
  12. The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman – (70 pages)
  13. Naming the Bane by Kal S. Davian – (74 pages)
  14. The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain – (75 pages)
  15. Bardo99 by Cecile Pineda – (79 pages)
  16. Saint’s Testimony by Frank O’Connor – (80 pages)
  17. Chess by Stefan Zweig – (83 pages)
  18. Darkness Visible by William Styron – (84 pages)
  19. Re-thinking History by Keith Jenkins – (84 pages)
  20. The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy – (86 pages)
  21. Candide by Voltaire – (94 pages)
  22. The Pearl by John Steinbeck – (96 pages)
  23. The Scarlet Plague by Jack London – (98 pages)
  24. The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Cesares – (103 pages)
  1. Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett – (108 pages)
  2. Night by Elie Wiesel – (109 pages)
  3. The Call of the Wild by Jack London – (111 pages)
  4. Animal farm by George Orwell – (112 pages)
  5. Cove by Cynan Jones – (112 pages)
  6. Wenjack by Joseph Boyden – (112 pages)
  7. A Night of Serious Drinking by René Daumal – (121 pages)
  8. The Stranger by Albert Camus – (123 pages)
  9. The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett – (124 pages)
  10. The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran – (127 pages)
  11. Southern mail by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – (128 pages)
  12. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, Jeremy Leggatt – (131 pages)
  13. HELP! A Bear is Eating Me! by Mykle Hansen – (132 pages)
  14. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway – (132 pages)
  15. The Awakening by Kate Chopin – (135 pages)
  16. Notes From Underground by F.M. Dostoyevsky – (136 pages)
  17. The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide – (140 pages)
  18. The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker – (142 pages)
  19. 33 Days by Léon Werth – (144 pages)
  20. God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment by Scott Adams – (144 pages)
  21. In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan – (144 pages)
  22. Reasons to Live by Amy Hempel Short stories – (144 pages)
  23. The Moon Is Down by John Steinbeck – (144 pages)
  24. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson – (144 pages)
  25. When The Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka – (144 pages)
  1. The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold – (144 pages)
  2. All My Friends Are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman – (145 pages)
  3. Life Of Pi by Yann Martel – (146 pages)
  4. The Colour Out of Space by H. P. Lovecraft – (146 pages)
  5. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson – (146 pages)
  6. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess – (150 pages)
  7. One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovitch by Solzhenitsyn – (150 pages)
  8. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse – (152 pages)
  9. Among the Hidden by Margaret Peterson Haddix – (153 pages)
  10. Out of Grief, Singing by Charlene Diehl – (155 pages)
  11. The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff – (158 pages)
  12. The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder – (160 pages)
  13. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson – (162 pages)
  14. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes – (163 pages)
  15. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino – (165 pages)
  16. Dead Poets Society by N.H. Kleinbaum – (166 pages)
  17. Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor E. Frankl – (170 pages)
  18. No One Writes To The Colonel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – (170 pages)
  19. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson – (172 pages)
  20. Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire – (173 pages)
  21. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges – (174 pages)
  22. Planet of The Apes by Pierre Boulle – (174 pages)
  23. Sula by Toni Morrison – (174 pages)
  24. Revenge by Yoko Ogawa – (176 pages)
  25. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon – (178 pages)
  1. The Giver by Lois Lowry – (179 pages)
  2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald – (180 pages)
  3. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman – (180 pages)
  4. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton – (180 pages)
  5. After the Quake by Haruki Murakami – (181 pages)
  6. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck – (181 pages)
  7. Fat City by Leonard Gardner – (183 pages)
  8. Child of God by Cormac McCarthy – (186 pages)
  9. Slab by Selah Saterstrom – (186 pages)
  10. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck – (187 pages)
  11. Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews – (188 pages)
  12. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad – (188 pages)
  13. Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf – (192 pages)
  14. The Art of Killing Well by Marco Malvaldi – (192 pages)
  15. The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset – (192 pages)
  16. Tribe: On Homecoming and Becoming by Sebastian Junger – (192 pages)
  17. Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom – (192 pages)
  18. The Blizzard by Vladimir Sorokin – (193 pages)
  19. The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom – (196 pages)
  20. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho – (197 pages)
  21. Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt by Kristin Hersh – (198 pages)
  22. Carrie by Stephen King – (199 pages)
  23. The Coma by Alex Garland – (200 pages)
  24. Ubik by Philip K. Dick – (202 pages)
  25. Wreck of the Gossamer: Puzzle box Chronicles by Shawn P. McCarthy – (202 pages)
  1. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer – (207 pages)
  2. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk – (208 pages)
  3. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut – (215 pages)
  4. The Vegetarian by Han Kang – (216 pages)
  5. Nerve by Jeanne Ryan – (220 pages)
  6. Richard Brautigan – Sombrero Fallout – (224 pages)
  7. The I Chong: Meditations from the Joint by Tommy Chong – (224 pages)
  8. The Last Girlfriend on Earth by Simon Rich – (224 pages)
  9. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky – (224 pages)
  10. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon – (226 pages)
  11. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – (227 pages)
  12. This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz – (240 pages)
  13. The Road by Cormac McCarthy – (241 pages)
  14. The Wandering Falcon by Jamil Ahmad – (243 pages)
  15. Sand Omnibus by Hugh Howey – (252 pages)
  16. Bird Box by Josh Malerman – (260 pages)
  17. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind, translated by John E. Woods – (263 pages)
  18. Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk – (272 pages)
  19. The Art of War by Sun Tzu – (273 pages)
  20. Any Man by Amber Tamblyn – (288 pages)
  21. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robert Sloan – (288 pages)
  22. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes – (311 pages)
  23. Colorless by Haruki Murakami – (314 pages)
  24. Phoenix Island by John Dixon – (320 pages)
  25. Room by Emma Donoghue – (352 pages)
  26. Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened by Allie Brosh – (369 pages)
  27. The Martian by Andy Weir – (369 pages)