These French short stories are an easy way to practice your French with real literature. You'll find short stories, novellas and plays in PDF, each one short enough to finish in an afternoon.
There are original tales by Maupassant, Daudet and Flaubert, next to translated classics by Andersen and Poe. You'll also find Molière's comedies, Voltaire's satire and La Fontaine's fables.
Each section tells you its reading level, so you can pick by vocabulary and comfort. Every book is free to download, with no sign-up.
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French Authors
Short Stories Written in French
Maupassant, Daudet and Flaubert wrote some of the finest short stories in French. They're original texts with clear sentences and everyday scenes, great from an intermediate level.
Twenty-one short stories by Maupassant in his original French, with everyday scenes and endings that catch you off guard. Clear sentences and a quick pace, great from an intermediate level.
Includes La Dernière Classe and other short stories about the war of 1870 and life in Paris. Moving texts in plain language, widely used for reading practice.
Un cœur simple, La Légende de saint Julien l'Hospitalier and Hérodias, the three tales that closed Flaubert's career. Precise, polished prose for confident readers.
Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Cruel Tales and New Cruel Tales, short stories of dark irony with a fantastic edge. A 19th-century classic for advanced readers.
Grimm, Andersen, Poe and Pushkin stories in 19th-century French translations, some signed by Baudelaire and Mérimée. If you already know the story in English, reading it in French is much easier.
The big collection of Andersen's tales in French: The Little Mermaid, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, The Emperor's New Clothes and many more. If you know the stories already, the reading flows.
Twenty-five Grimm fairy tales in French, from Hansel and Gretel to Snow White and Rapunzel. Simple sentences and familiar plots, perfect for building fluency.
The Black Cat, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum and more, in Charles Baudelaire's famous translation. Poe's horror and mystery in top-tier literary French.
Pushkin's The Queen of Spades, about a gambler obsessed with a secret card trick, translated into French by Prosper Mérimée. Also includes the story Le Hussard.
Complete short novels you can finish in a day or two, like Mérimée's Carmen and Balzac's Le Colonel Chabert. Kafka and Conrad round out the section, in intermediate to advanced French.
Marlow travels up the Congo River in search of the mysterious Kurtz. Conrad's Heart of Darkness, one of the most influential novellas of the 20th century, in a complete French translation.
The novella behind Bizet's opera: the tragic passion between the soldier Don José and Carmen. Elegant, direct French, a good fit from upper intermediate.
A colonel left for dead at the battle of Eylau returns to Paris to reclaim his name and fortune. Balzac's short novel is the perfect way into The Human Comedy.
Dupin, Sherlock Holmes and Arsène Lupin, Maurice Leblanc's gentleman thief, solve their cases in French. The plot keeps you reading even when you don't know every word.
A golden beetle, a coded message and a hidden pirate treasure. The Gold-Bug, the Poe story that brought cryptography into fiction, translated by Baudelaire.
A short crime novel by Gaboriau, the father of the French detective story, told by a young man drawn into a murder case. Classic suspense in the original French.
19th-century French fantastic fiction is some of the best in the genre, from Maupassant to Mérimée and Gautier. Le Horla still unsettles readers worldwide, and it reads well from an intermediate level.
The diary of a man haunted by an invisible presence that drives him to madness. Maupassant's most famous psychological horror story, in his original French.
A traveler uncovers the secret of a coastal town ruled by creatures of the sea. The Shadow over Innsmouth, one of Lovecraft's key tales of cosmic horror, in French.
Five fantastic tales by Théophile Gautier, including The Mummy's Foot, Arria Marcella and The Hashish Club. The best of 19th-century French fantasy fiction.
Wells, Verne and Rosny aîné, pioneers of science fiction, in short stories translated or written in French. The vocabulary is a bit more technical, so an upper intermediate level helps.
A prehistoric tribe faces geometric beings from another world, in one of the first science fiction stories written in French. Also includes the story Le Cataclysme.
Wells's famous story about an isolated valley where no one can see, plus other short stories. The Country of the Blind in a French edition from the Bibliothèque électronique du Québec.
The Time Traveller reaches the year 802,701 and finds humanity split into Eloi and Morlocks. The Time Machine, the novella that founded modern science fiction, in French.
A Geneva clockmaker believes his life depends on the clocks he built, in a fantastic and scientific tale by Jules Verne. Includes four original illustrations from the Hetzel edition.
Alice, Oz and The Little Prince in French, together with Beauty and the Beast by Madame Leprince de Beaumont. Many readers know these stories by heart, which makes them perfect for building confidence.
Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion on the yellow brick road. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, complete in 24 chapters with a compact layout.
Alice falls down the rabbit hole into an absurd and wonderful world. Alice in Wonderland, a complete French translation in twelve illustrated chapters.
The Little Prince in its original French, with the author's own drawings. Short sentences and simple vocabulary make it one of the best books to start reading in French.
Theater is pure dialogue, so it's a great way to learn spoken French. Plays by Molière, Racine, Marivaux and Musset each take less than two hours to read.
Voltaire mocks everything in Candide and Micromégas, and Gogol pushes the absurd to the limit. These are funny, quick reads, enjoyable from an intermediate level.
A giant from the star Sirius and his friend from Saturn visit Earth and laugh at human vanity. A short philosophical tale by Voltaire, in the original French.
Two satirical stories by Gogol: a humble clerk obsessed with his new overcoat, and an official who loses his nose. Absurd humor in the translation by Léon Goldschman and Ernest Jaubert.
French fairy tales and fables by Perrault, La Fontaine, Andersen and Grimm, just a few pages each. They're the easiest texts on the page, ideal for beginners.
The Grasshopper and the Ant, The Crow and the Fox and the rest of La Fontaine's first four books of fables. The short texts most read in French-speaking schools.
