Learn German by
reading real stories.

by O. Henry

It is the day before Christmas and Della has one dollar and eighty-seven cents, most of it in pennies saved a few at a time. She has exactly one thing left worth selling — and so, though she does not know it yet, does Jim.

by Edgar Allan Poe

William Legrand lives half-wild on a sandbar off the Carolina coast, ruined, alone, and lately obsessed with a beetle of solid gold he swears he has found. His friends think the fever has taken him. Then the scrap of parchment he handled turns out to be written in invisible ink.

by John Buchan

A framed man on the run with secrets that could start a war.

Richard Hannay is bored half to death with London until the man across the landing talks his way into his flat, explains a plot against Europe, and turns up three days later with a knife in his chest. Wanted by the police and hunted by the men who did it, Hannay runs for the Scottish moors with a dead man's notebook.

by Jack London

From pampered pet to legend of the wild.

Buck is stolen from a sunlit California estate and sold north into the Klondike, where a dog is a tool and a beating is a lesson. Club and fang teach him quickly. What they wake in him is older than any of it, and it is calling from the timber.

A woman died under a crane nobody inspected. The file says the case is closed — and it's signed in Jana's name.

Harbour police officer Jana Reincke pulls the file on a routine workplace death and finds her own signature on a closure she never wrote. A woman is dead under a crane nobody inspected, and the paperwork says Jana already decided it did not matter.

by Johann David Wyss

Shipwrecked. Resourceful. Unbreakable.

A Swiss pastor, his wife and their four sons wake to find the ship broken on a reef and everyone else gone. The island gives them wood, water and animals enough to live; what they build from it, season by season, turns out to be less a camp than a country of their own.

by Robert Louis Stevenson

X marks the spot—but the real treasure is surviving.

Jim Hawkins keeps his head down at his family's quiet English inn until a dying sea captain leaves a map behind — and men with knives start asking after it. He sails for the treasure among a crew he has no reason to doubt, and the friendliest man aboard is the one who means to kill him.