Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection

An afternoon at the Sheridan’s garden party will be perfect. Darling Laura is doing a marvelous job negotiating with the band, workmen, cook, and florist who appears with an unexpected delivery, all without her mother’s help. But, distressing news reaches the house just before lunch. A young man from one of the sordid little cottages down the lane was killed in an accident, and suddenly Laura can’t imagine proceeding with the party.

From Katherine Mansfield, one of the most talented and pioneering masters of the short story in English, of whom Virginia Woolf once wrote: “I was jealous of her writing—the only writing I have ever been jealous of,” “The Garden Party” is an exquisite paragon of the form.

An ebook short.