The Top 10 Short Stories - Sadness: The ten best short stories of all time about sadness

Written by D. H. Lawrence, Nikolai Gogol, Katherine Mansfield and 7 more

Narrated by Richard Mitchley, Eve Karpf and Christopher Ragland

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere.

In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?

The theme itself will form the boundaries for our stories which range from well-known classics, newly told, to stories that modern times have overlooked but perfectly exemplify the theme. Throughout the volume our authors whether of instant recognition or new to you are all leviathans of literature.

Some you may disagree with but they will get you thinking; about our choices and about those you would have made. If this volume takes you on a path to discover more of these miniature masterpieces then we have all gained something.

In this volume our author’s pens turn to tales of sadness. This distressing feeling can arrive at a moment’s notice or gradually build and overwhelm. Within these stories Anton Chekhov, Sherwood Anderson, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Katherine Mansfield and many others explore and reveal the consequences.

1 - The Top 10 Short Stories - Sadness - An Introduction

2 - Odour of Chrysanthemums by D H Lawrence

3 - The Cloak by Nikolai Gogol also known as 'The Overcoat'

4 - Life of Ma Parker by Katherine Mansfield

5 - Paul's Case by Willa Cather

6 - Silence by Leonid Andreyev

7 - The Stones of the Village by Alice Dunbar Nelson

8 - Hide And Seek or Pliatki by Fyodor Sologub

9 - Hands by Sherwood Anderson

10 - Vanka by Anton Chekhov

11 - A Dark Brown Dog by Stephen Crane

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Copyright Group
• Release date: Nov 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781835478271

D. H. Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence was born on 11th September 1881 in Eastwood, a small mining village in Nottinghamshire, in the English Midlands. Despite ill health as a child and a comparatively disadvantageous position in society, he became a teacher in 1908, and took up a post in a school in Croydon, south of London. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911, and from then until his death he wrote feverishly, producing poetry, novels, essays, plays travel books and short stories, while travelling around the world, settling for periods in Italy, New Mexico and Mexico. He married Frieda Weekley in 1914 and died of tuberculosis in 1930.