A taste of the world’s best short stories Great stories.
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Free study guides for classic short stories and novels: themes, characters, symbols, quotes and endings explained in under 20 minutes, with flashcards and a quiz to make it stick.
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View all topics → Featured Story Kate Chopin
The Story of an Hour
In barely a thousand words, Chopin turns an hour of supposed grief into one of literature’s sharpest studies of a woman discovering she wants to be free.
Read analysis →“free, free, free!”— The Story of an Hour
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All 179 pages by Karen Bernardo →StoryBites began with Karen Bernardo (1949 to 2021), who spent years explaining the short stories nobody else online bothered with. Her analyses are preserved here as she wrote them, at their original addresses.
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Edgar Allan Poe
William Shakespeare
Ernest Hemingway
Kate Chopin
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Flannery O'Connor
Stephen Crane
Charles Dickens