Zadie Smith shares why she loves this almost ‘anti-Italian’ story from Giuseppe Pontiggia, then reads the story, as part of our seasonal series of short stories selected by leading novelists

Neil Gaiman introduces Rudyard Kipling’s The Gardener, a melancholy tale from 1925, as part of our seasonal series of short stories selected by leading novelists. Afterwards, the story is read by actor Marion Bailey

Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell introduces one of the great, early 20th century horror stories: WW Jacobs’s spine-tingling The Monkey’s Paw

A small boy’s rebellion takes a sinister turn in Saki’s classic tale – a story loved by Stephen Fry, who explains why

In this instalment of our seasonal short story special, we have Neil Gaiman share why he loves Kipling’s melancholy story, which is then read by actor Marion Bailey

James Salter, the veteran American novelist and short story writer, reads a story by Lydia Davis, winner of the 2013 Man Booker International prize

Jorge Luis Borges’s combination of the anecdotal, philosophical and the literary showed Will Self how to achieve the ‘truly veridical’. He gets his coordinates from ‘On Exactitude in Science’

Nathan Englander finds Jewish history, corruption and man’s inhumanity to man and pigeons in Isaac Babel’s ‘The Story Of My Dovecote’

Forty years after he first read it, Sebastian Barry returns to James Joyce’s short story Eveline

Penelope Fitzgerald looks at the world anew in her short story ‘At Hiruharama’, says AS Byatt

Franz Kafka’s story of a man who starves himself for entertainment, The Hunger Artist, is ‘absurb, moving and timely’, says Hanif Kureishi

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie admires the ‘old-fashioned social realism’ of Ama Ata Aidoo’s ‘No Sweetness Here’