W. W. Jacobs

Middle East and Mediterranean

• Esther

• "Ali Baba and the Forty Robbers"

North American

•  The Oral Tradition in the Modern World

• Washington Irving
• "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" 
• "Rip Van Winkle"

• Edgar Allen Poe

• "The Masque of the Red Death" (1842)

• Richard Connell
• "The Most Dangerous Game"
• O. Henry

• "The Gift of the Magi": Bright

• Stephen Vincent Benét (pronounced bih-NAY)

• "By the Waters of Babylon": Sci-Fi

•  Louis L'Amour

• "Trap of Gold": Adventure

• Alice Walker
• "Everyday Use"  
• Amy Tan
• "Two Kinds"

• Jon Krakauer 
• "Into Thin Air" 

• Contest Winner from Bookshop Santa Cruz: "Among the Trees" by Breanna Eddy 

South America

• Jorge Luis Borges
• "The Book of Sand"
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" 

British

• Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)  

• "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" 

• "The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier" 

• Edgar Allan Poe
• Click here for a bank of stories.

• Rudyard Kipling

•  "The Man Who Would be King"

• Hilaire Belloc

• "The Mowing of a Field" (1906) 
• "The Wing of Dalua"

• G. K. Chesterton (1874--1936)

• "A Piece of Chalk" (1909)
• More essays:
• A Defense of Nonsense (any essay in this collection)
• "The Blue Cross"(audio version) (the first of a series of Father Brown detective stories). Here are more tales:
• The Innocence of Father Brown
  The Wisdom of Father Brown
  Father Brown (from Collected Works)

•  W. W. Jacobs

  • "The Monkey's Paw"

• Adelaide Casely-Hayford

  • "Mista Courifer" (1961)

• Doris Lessing  
• "Through the Tunnel" (or here as a .doc) 

  Russian

• Leo Tolstoy

• "How Much Land Does a Man Need?"