Forty years after he first discovered it, Sebastian Barry explains why he loves James Joyce’s short story Eveline, then reads it for you, as part of our seasonal series of short stories selected by leading novelists

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

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shares why she admires the ‘old-fashioned social realism’ of the Ghanaian writer’s No Sweetness Here, 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

You’ll never sleep in a twin bedroom again after hearing this classic Edwardian ghost story, selected by Penelope Lively and read by Simon Callow as part of our seasonal series of short stories selected by leading novelists

Jonathan Safran Foer explains why he loves this tale about the Bosnian author’s father, which is then read by Chris Moran

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

You’ll never sleep in a twin bedroom again after hearing this classic Edwardian ghost story, selected by Penelope Lively read by Simon Callow

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

Rabindranath Tagore returned again and again to the voiceless women of Bengal, as in his short story The Postmaster, says Anita Desai

Lucy Wood builds a story from glimpses and suggestions in ‘Notes from the House Spirits’, says Jon McGregor

Yiyun Li reads William Trevor’s ‘Three People’, a short story which moved her to write a story in reply, ‘Gold Boy, Emerald Girl’

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