Where do I go to find sites for short stories and essays? Free short stories are pretty easy to find on Gutenberg, but the truth is that sometimes you need a curated list rather than just a single search term wading through the public domain sludge.

I’ve got you. Here’s the list of the best anthologies of free short stories and free essays on Gutenberg:

• The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 2 by Edgar Allan Poe
• The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers
• Some Christmas Stories by Charles Dickens
• The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar by Maurice Leblanc
• The Happy Prince, and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde
• Mosses from an old manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling
• Complete Original Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant by Guy de Maupassant
• Best Russian Short Stories
• The Mysterious Stranger, and Other Stories by Mark Twain
• The Garden Party, and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield
• The Piazza Tales by Herman Melville
• Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen by H. C. Andersen
• The book of Scottish story : historical, humorous, legendary, and imaginative, selected from the works of standard Scottish authors by Various
• The Best American Humorous Short Stories
• Project Gutenberg Compilation of Short Stories by Chekhov
• How to Tell a Story, and Other Essays by Mark Twain
• Men without women by Ernest Hemingway
• The Open Boat and Other Stories by Stephen Crane
• The Bet, and other stories by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
• The Mantle, and Other Stories by Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol
• The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy
• The Queen of Spades, and other stories by Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
• Love of Life, and Other Stories by Jack London

That should keep you busy for quite some time. Let me know what you end up choosing from among the list, what sticks out to you. Let me know what you hated.

Where?

In the comments, of course.

Photo by Stefan Steinbauer on Unsplash