Library of Short Stories – An online library of public domain short stories | Hacker News Reader

Library of Short Stories – An online library of public domain short stories

libraryofshortstories.com

58 pointsHerveyDeyo8 comments

These stories do appear to be censored for modern day sensibilities. You might want to mention that at the top of stories where words were truncated or removed, like in:

https://www.libraryofshortstories.com/onlinereader/aepyornis...

(Gutenberg provides this H.G. Wells story verbatim: https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11870/pg11870-images.html#l... )

My advice: content warnings should suffice. Let readers experience these stories as they were written, and limit any modern commentary to annotations. We must not erase history, only provide guidance.

For now I'll add a mention that the slurs are lined out. And I'll consider changing the texts back.

or perhaps offer both versions. Thank you for this library.

If you display both versions of the text: it might be helpful to add links to contextual resources, such as the origins of a slur and the historical setting of the writing.

It's only one word that I have lined out, and 90% of the stories containing this word are written by two authors, H. G. Wells and H. P. Lovecraft. So it doesn't need much context. Believe me, those two make it obvious what they mean when they use the word.

*And 50% of the uses of the word occur in one single story "The Rats in the Walls"

I created a place to read all the short stories from history; it is hopefully a bit more modern and easier to navigate than Americanliterature.com and Project Gutenberg.

It houses about a thousand short stories (under 20,000 words) that have left copyright, including Lovecraft, Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and others.

I'd love to know how easy or difficult people find it to use.

Usually I'm wary of online reading, but this has a very usuable interface on mobile. Epub downloads: check! Looks pretty good!

Just noticed your username after reading about half of _The Man Who Could Imitate a Bee_.

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