Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors
post
page
product
Want to stay in the loop with latest bookish news and views? Subscribe to HarperBroadcast!
harpercollins-broadcast
close
search

Top 20 Classics for Children | EXCERPTS

Share

19.02.2021

Best Classic Short Stories for Children brings together some of the most well-known and beloved stories by authors like O. Henry, Oscar Wilde and Saki, and extracts from children’s classics such as The Railway Children and Little Women.

This book is the perfect way to introduce your child to the best-loved stories of all time! Read excerpts:

1) A Day in the Country by Anton Chekhov

A dark leaden-coloured mass is creeping over the sky towards the sun. Red zigzags of lightning gleam here and there across it. There is a sound of far-away rumbling. A warm wind frolics over the grass, bends the trees, and stirs up the dust. In a minute there will be a spurt of May rain and a real storm will begin.

best classic short stories excerpts

2) The Adventure of the Speckled Band by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

On glancing over my notes of the seventy odd cases in which I have during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes, I find many tragic, some comic, a large number merely strange, but none commonplace; for, working as he did rather for the love of his art than for the acquirement of wealth, he refused to associate himself with any investigation which did not tend towards the unusual, and even the fantastic.

best classic short stories excerpts

3) Dracula’s Guest by Bram Stoker

When we started for our drive the sun was shining brightly on Munich, and the air was full of the joyousness of early summer. Just as we were about to depart, Herr Delbrück (the maître d’hôtel of the Quatre Saisons, where I was staying) came down, bareheaded, to the carriage and, after wishing me a pleasant drive, said to the coachman, still holding his hand on the handle of the carriage door…

best classic short stories excerpts

4) The Merchant of Venice retold by Charles and Mary Lamb

Shylock, the Jew, lived at Venice. He was an usurer, who had amassed an immense fortune by lending money at great interest to Christian merchants. Shylock, being a hard-hearted man, exacted the payment of the money he lent with such severity that he was much disliked by all good men, and particularly by Antonio, a young merchant of Venice; and Shylock as much hated Antonio, because he used to lend money to people in distress, and would never take any interest for the money he lent. Therefore there was great enmity between this covetous Jew and the generous merchant Antonio. Whenever Antonio met Shylock on the Rialto (or Exchange), he used to reproach him with his usuries and hard dealings, which the Jew would bear with seeming patience, while he secretly meditated revenge.

best classic short stories excerpts

5) Oliver Twist: Treats of Oliver Twist’s Birth, Education and Board by Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist’s ninth birthday found him a pale thin child, somewhat diminutive in stature, and decidedly small in circumference. But nature or inheritance had implanted a good sturdy spirit in Oliver’s breast. It had had plenty of room to expand, thanks to the spare diet of the establishment; and perhaps to this circumstance may be attributed his having any ninth birthday at all. Be this as it may, however, it was his ninth birthday; and he was keeping it in the coal-cellar with a select party of two other young gentleman, who, after participating with him in a sound thrashing, had been locked up for atrociously presuming to be hungry, when Mrs. Mann, the good lady of the house, was unexpectedly startled by the apparition of Mr. Bumble, the beadle, striving to undo the wicket of the garden-gate.

best classic short stories excerpts

6) From Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Five o’clock had hardly struck on the morning of the 19th of January, when Bessie brought a candle into my closet and found me already up and nearly dressed. I had risen half-an-hour before her entrance, and had washed my face, and put on my clothes by the light of a half-moon just setting, whose rays streamed through the narrow window near my crib. I was to leave Gateshead that day by a coach which passed the lodge gates at six a.m. Bessie was the only person yet risen; she had lit a re in the nursery, where she now proceeded to make my breakfast.

best classic short stories excerpts

7) The Railway Children: Peter’s Coal Mine by E. Nesbit

“What fun!” said Mother, in the dark, feeling for the matches on the table. “How frightened the poor mice were – I don’t believe they were rats at all.”

She struck a match and relighted the candle and everyone looked at each other by its winky, blinky light.

“Well,” she said, “you’ve often wanted something to happen and now it has. This is quite an adventure, isn’t it? I told Mrs. Viney to get us some bread and butter, and meat and things, and to have supper ready. I suppose she’s laid it in the dining room. So let’s go and see.”

best classic short stories excerpts

8) April Showers by Edith Wharton

“But Guy’s heart slept under the violets on Muriel’s grave.” It was a beautiful ending; Theodora had seen girls cry over last chapters that weren’t half as pathetic. She laid her pen aside and read the words over, letting her voice linger on the fall of the sentence; then, drawing a deep breath, she wrote across the foot of the page the name by which she had decided to become known in literature – Gladys Glyn.

best classic short stories excerpts

9) From the Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emma Orczy

PARIS: SEPTEMBER, 1792.
A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate. The hour, some little time before sunset, and the place, the West Barricade, at the very spot where, a decade later, a proud tyrant raised an undying monument to the nation’s glory and his own vanity.

best classic short stories excerpts

10) The Secret Garden: The Cry int he Corridor by Frances Hodgson Burnett

At first each day which passed by for Mary Lennox was exactly like the others. Every morning she awoke in her tapestried room and found Martha kneeling upon the hearth building her re; every morning she ate her breakfast in the nursery which had nothing amusing in it; and after each breakfast she gazed out of the window across to the huge moor which seemed to spread out on all sides and climb up to the sky, and after she had stared for a while she realised that if she did not go out she would have to stay in and do nothing – and so she went out.

best classic short stories excerpts

11) The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes by H.G. Wells

The transitory mental aberration of Sidney Davidson, remarkable enough in itself, is still more remarkable if Wade’s explanation is to be credited. It sets one dreaming of the oddest possibilities of intercommunication in the future, of spending an intercalary five minutes on the other side of the world, or being watched in our most secret operations by unsuspected eyes. It happened that I was the immediate witness of Davidson’s seizure, and so it falls naturally to me to put the story upon paper.

best classic short stories excerpts

12) Alice in Wonderland: Down the Rabbit-Hole by Lewis Carroll

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”

best classic short stories excerpts

13) The Wizard of Oz: The Cyclone and The Council with Munchkins by L. Frank Baum

Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles. There were four walls, a floor and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty looking cookstove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em had a big bed in one corner, and Dorothy a little bed in another corner. There was no garret at all, and no cellar – except a small hole dug in the ground, called a cyclone cellar, where the family could go in case one of those great whirlwinds arose, mighty enough to crush any building in its path. It was reached by a trap door in the middle of the floor, from which a ladder led down into the small, dark hole.

best classic short stories excerpts

14) Anne of Green Gables: Matthew Cuthbert is Surprised by L.M. Montgomery

Matthew Cuthbert and the sorrel mare jogged comfortably over the eight miles to Bright River. It was a pretty road, running along between snug farmsteads, with now and again a bit of balsamy fir wood to drive through or a hollow where wild plums hung out their filmy bloom. The air was sweet with the breath of many apple orchards and the meadows sloped away in the distance to horizon mists of pearl and purple; while

“The little birds sang as if it were
The one day of summer in all the year.”

best classic short stories excerpts

15) Little Women: Amy’s Valley of Humiliation by Louisa May Alcott

“That boy is a perfect cyclops, isn’t he?” said Amy one day, as Laurie clattered by on horseback, with a flourish of his whip as he passed.

“How dare you say so, when he’s got both his eyes? And very handsome ones they are, too,” cried Jo, who resented any slighting remarks about her friend.

“I didn’t say anything about his eyes, and I don’t see why you need fire up when I admire his riding.”

“Oh, my goodness! That little goose means a centaur, and she called him a Cyclops,” exclaimed Jo, with a burst of laughter.

best classic short stories excerpts

16) The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

best classic short stories excerpts

17) The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde

High above the city, on a tall column, stood the statue of the Happy Prince. He was gilded all over with thin leaves of fine gold, for eyes he had two bright sapphires, and a large red ruby glowed on his sword-hilt.

best classic short stories excerpts

18) The Kabuliwala by Rabindranath Tagore

My five-year-old daughter Mini cannot live without chattering. I really believe that in all her life she has not wasted a minute in silence. Her mother is often vexed at this, and would stop her prattle, but I would not. To see Mini quiet is unnatural, and I cannot bear it long. And so my own talk with her is always lively.

best classic short stories excerpts

19) Rikki-Tikki-Tavi by Rudyard Kipling

At the hole where he went in Red-Eye called to Wrinkle-Skin. Hear what little Red-Eye saith:
Nag, come up and dance with death!’ Eye to eye and head to head,

(Keep the measure, Nag.)
This shall end when one is dead; (At thy pleasure, Nag.)
Turn for turn and twist for twist— (Run and hide thee, Nag.)
Hah! The hooded Death has missed! (Woe betide thee, Nag!)

This is the story of the great war that Rikki-tikki-tavi fought single-handed, through the bathrooms of the big bungalow in Segowlee cantonment. Darzee, the tailor-bird, helped him, and Chuchundra, the musk-rat, who never comes out into the middle of the floor, but always creeps round by the wall, gave him advice; but Rikki-tikki did the real fighting.

best classic short stories excerpts

20) The Lumber Room by Saki

The children were to be driven, as a special treat, to the sands at Jagborough. Nicholas was not to be of the party; he was in disgrace. Only that morning he had refused to eat his wholesome bread-and-milk on the seemingly frivolous ground that there was a frog in it. Older and wiser and better people had told him that there could not possibly be a frog in his bread-and-milk and that he was not to talk nonsense; he continued, nevertheless, to talk what seemed the veriest nonsense, and described with much detail the colouration and markings of the alleged frog.

best classic short stories excerpts

To read the complete stories from this delightful book of classics, order your copy of Best Classic Short Stories today!


Deprecated: File Theme without comments.php is deprecated since version 3.0.0 with no alternative available. Please include a comments.php template in your theme. in /var/www/html/harper_staging/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6085

There are no comments.


Warning: Undefined variable $aria_req in /var/www/html/harper_staging/wp-content/themes/harpercollins/comments.php on line 67

Warning: Undefined variable $aria_req in /var/www/html/harper_staging/wp-content/themes/harpercollins/comments.php on line 68

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Favourite Banner
Your favourite literary newsletter just got a makeover!

New Releases • Author Speak • Events & Festivals Recommendations • First Look • After School Tales Press Room • Pre Orders • Coming Soon • Special Offers Trending • Just In • Also Read • And much more...