Invest just a few minutes in a great short story and you may be rewarded with a lesson or memory that lasts a lifetime. And it’s not just the short stories； the authors can also surprise you. We hope that you will return to this collection again and again； to re-read these classic favorites and train your literature mind.

Victor-Marie Hugo is known abroad for his novels, especially Les Misrables and Notre-Dame de Paris, but in France for his poetry and plays. More a leftist with each passing year, he was forced into exile during the reign of Napoleon III and lived briefly in Belgium. Hugo was a political man, speaking out against the death penalty and in favor of pacifism and freedom of the press. In his youth, he was a Catholic but later was a Spiritualist and a Deist.