Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
He said it like a verdict. "The Empress cannot be you." I spat a sunflower seed shell at him like a petty insult, watched it land beside his hair and felt my face turn into something I did not recognize. "Then she won't be the Empress either," I said, laughing too loud and too sharp. Matteo brushed the shell from his hair with the gentlest of gestures, as if he were petting a cat instead of touching the thing I had flicked at him. "You're too loud," he murmured. "Be quiet." I...
I was a side concubine in the Crown Prince's house. My name is Amy Conrad, but everyone called me "Liangdi" in whispers that never fit my mouth. I had been here three years. For three years I lived between a laughing prince and a smiling princess, eating the scraps of their happiness like stale mooncakes. "They always sit together," I said once to Josefina Barker, my maid, when the prince and princess praised each other like a pair of matched lanterns. Josefina smiled, "They are made for...
I was twelve when the world I trusted split along a seam I never saw. "My daughter will live with me," I said in the courtroom, and I meant it as a promise to my mother. I meant it as a shield. "I understand," my father murmured, mouth dry, while the judge looked through us like we were weather. The room smelled of paper and stale perfume. My mother, Mary Gross, sat like a mute monument, pale and fragile as a pressed flower. Fernanda Dunn, my aunt, sat across with Polina Johnston—a child...
I blinked awake to the system chime in my skull and grinned like an idiot. "Host, welcome to the one-thousandth world," the voice said. "Finally," I breathed. "One more, then retirement." "Prepare. Destination incoming." "Please," I whispered, folding my hands. "Give me something big. Give me riches, harem, a relaxed retirement." "Transmission complete." I checked down where a respectable cheat-sheet would have been. Empty. "Okay, system," I muttered. "You owe me." When...
I had never slept at Orlando Daley's apartment before that night. "I told you, take your coat," he said as I stood stiff in the doorway, rain thrumming the windows. "I can walk you out," I answered, and he smiled in a way he never did at work. "No need," he said, "stay. It's late." "Okay," I said, and the word felt small and safe. The lock clicked. The night settled like a soft blanket. Then the door banged open. "Stop!" someone cried. I felt Orlando's body go suddenly rigid...
I never expected a hospital hallway to become a stage. "This is the men's clinic, the women's department is downstairs," the doctor said without looking up. "Come in, my husband, quick—" I called, fingers already on the door handle, watching the man's face shift the way a painting loses light. Pax Duffy glanced up. For one slow heartbeat I thought he recognized me. Then his eyes slid away like a curtain closing. "Everlee," I said, soft, the way you say someone's name when you try to...
I woke before dawn, because habit from a life I remembered like a map—old, worn, and deadly clear—pulled me out of bed. The small house smelled of night sweat and straw. I padded across the floor, careful not to wake Maxwell, and washed my face in the cold water we kept for mornings. "My jacket," he mumbled from the bed without opening his eyes. I hung it over my arm and went out the door with a shovel. The earth was the same, the sky thin and hard as a coin. At the irrigation entrance...
I woke with my head on someone’s chest and the world smelled of smoke and river water and the salt of someone’s tears. “Hudson,” I whispered, because it was the only name that would stop my heart from pounding so hard it felt like it would break my ribs. He tightened his arms around me as if fear itself had hands. “Hold me.” Hudson Brady’s voice was thin and raw. “Madeline,” he said. “Don’t—please don’t leave me.” I wanted to laugh and choke at the same time. I wanted to tell him this...
I grew up with a bow in my hands and bruises under my skin. When I say "I," I mean Kiley Charles—though no one back then bothered to call me kindly. My parents said I was wrong because I practiced blade and bow instead of ink and brush. My father, Amos, and my mother, Laura, kept their goodness for the world and their cruelty for me. The first time I saw Emersyn, she ran up barefoot, a laugh like a bell. Two boys followed her, but she walked as if the sun belonged to her. "Wow, you shoot...
The acceptance letter arrived while I was knee-deep in midnight review notes, the little envelope shaking in my hands like it had a life of its own. "I got into Tsinghua," I said to my empty desk lamp, and the words felt like candy melting in my mouth. "You really did it," Carolina called from the next room through the thin wall. "No way. Show me." "I passed," I answered, and then louder, "I passed, Carolina. I—" I stopped myself from yelling like a lunatic and instead smoothed the...
I remember the lanterns first. Hundreds of them, paper skins painted with cranes and mountains, swinging under every painted eave of the palace. The whole court was a river of color and music. Fireworks stitched the night into sudden blooms. "Do you like it, Wan?" Hudson asked, smiling with that small, private look he never gave anyone but me. "Yes," Emberly purred on his arm, lips wet with wine. "It is wonderful." I watched them from the edge of the hall as I always did—my hands...
I still remember the smell of the road the night I left the only home I had ever known. "It smells like the river back home," I told myself, pressing my forehead to the car window as the mountains gave way to lights. "Keep your seatbelt on," my grandfather said from the driver's seat. Jackson Blankenship glanced at me in the rearview and smiled like the moon. "Don't be nervous, Kaelynn." "I won't," I lied, but my voice was honest enough that he took my hand without thinking. The...
I met Corinna one summer when I hadn't learned how to hide myself from the world yet. "You're late," my sister, Journee, said the moment I stepped into the living room, and then she turned to the girl on the sofa. "Corinna, this is my brother. Kai, meet Corinna." "Hi," I said, and bowed so hard I almost hit my forehead on the coffee table. "Call me Corinna," she laughed. "No formalities with friends." "Call you Corinna," I repeated, and felt stupid and enormous at the same...
I woke up under a white ceiling and for a long, dizzy second I only remembered the softness of fur and the smell of flax in the sunlight. I blinked like a cat and then realized my hands were hands — thin, warm, and human. "Isabel?" a voice echoed in my head and it felt like a memory someone else had given me. I pushed my hair off my face, sat up, and said, "I'm Isabel." "Isabel Cardoso?" the voice said again, softer, like a name it had worn carefully for years. I smiled without...
"Happy birthday." The karaoke room lights blinked like distant stars. There were seventeen candles on the tiny cake, and Jen Taylor—my oldest friend—pushed it toward me with a grin that crinkled her eyes. "Make a wish, Caroline," she said. "I wish my life would calm down for a week," I joked, but my laugh came out thin. "Don't be dramatic," Jen rolled her eyes and elbowed Drake Nichols, who was leaning against the wall with a drink. "Caroline just wants a normal week." "Normal is...
They say one small mistake can rip open the tidy places inside you and let everything tumble out. "I think your phone just called someone famous," my little niece Mango said, very seriously, her baby voice bright and wrong for the moment. "Who?" I asked, trying to keep the phone from slipping out of her small, clumsy hands. "Papa!" Mango announced into the screen like it was a grand revelation. On the other end of the video, a man in a neat coat frowned in blank confusion at a room...
I am Gwen Huang. I was sixteen the day they raised the small sedan into the courtyard and set me inside Eamon Vogel’s house. “I asked Aunt Emmalynn,” I told myself, folding my hands until my knuckles ached. “I asked and she said—” “Aunt Emmalynn,” I had asked once, clutching her sleeve the night before the wedding, “what is the real difference between a eunuch and an ordinary man?” She had stumbled, her fingers twisting a rosary of beads. “It’s that… that they cannot have children,”...
I woke to moonlight and the messy, dizzy ache of too much and too little sleep. The apartment smelled faintly of sandalwood and something metallic. My silk nightdress stuck to me like a second skin. Under the thin curtain of white fabric, shadows moved like vines. I blinked. A man rolled off the bed and laughed low. "Little princess, you can't burn bridges like that," he said, breathing in satisfaction. I turned my back on him and spat, "A toy. Just a toy. Keep it as trash if you...
I never thought a white shirt could start a small rebellion. "You look ridiculous," I said, standing in Hudson's doorway while he blinked at me like I had landed from another planet. "Friend," he said, and the single word sounded careful, as if he was testing the air. "Friend?" I laughed. "We haven't used 'friend' since high school." He shifted his weight. "We—yeah. Friend." "Then why are you standing in your own living room like a man at a shrine?" I stuck my head further inside...
"I watched him kiss her in the middle of my birthday party." That sentence sits in my memory like a bruise. I was twenty then, wearing what I thought was a brave smile. The room was full of people I knew by name and some I did not, but Vaughn Black stood out the way a storm does. He had taken my teenage years — the years I trailed after him — and folded them into a neat, unremarkable paper plane. He launched that plane in front of everyone the night his latest conquest...
