If you wanted to cover some short stories and poems in middle school

[conuly]

which ones would you pick? Public domain preferred, but if there's a super great anthology out there, I'm good with that too.

Comments

[snakeling]

For short stories, Saki is great and public domain. There's Arthur Conan Doyle, of course.

If you want to tackle non-English-speaking authors, Guy de Maupassant is a good one (I can't comment on the translations, though), so are Prosper Mérimée (La Vénus d'Ille) and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (Vera).

There's this on Wikisource : https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Stories_by_Foreign_Authors

I can't comment on the non-French ones, but the French choices seem quite good to me.

[snakeling]

Oh, and this one is a must-read in middle school in France: https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/3793.htm

It's more or less a longer version of the Niemöller poem, but it's well written, and it's a good prop to talk about fascism.