A short story, loosely based on the recollections of a number of veterans, dealing with the horrors of war. The story is free to download, but if you appreciate the story then you are asked to make a small donation to a charity of your choice.A short story, loosely based on the recollections of a number of veterans, dealing with the horrors of war. The story is free to download, but if you appreciate the story then you are asked to make a small donation to a charity of your choice.The short story, The Squad, is based on the recollections of a number of soldiers and a radio discussion on firing squads. The synopsis was written on the 1st Aug 2010 and the story was published on 12th Nov 2010. Views: 842
A Halloween thriller short story. When Tammy is house sitting, she get creeped out. She keeps hearing and seeing things in the dark corners of the mansion she is alone in. This time it is not her imagination, and she's about to go for the ride of her life.Ten-year-old Ava wakes in the night to the screams of her grandmother. Fearing for her life, she rushes to the window to escape the terror that waits outside her door.Full panic sets in when the doorknob jiggles, then the familiar voice of her aunt rings out. Confusion clouds Ava’s sleep-filled mind as she realizes no one is there to harm them. However, the message she’s given is much worse than anything she could have imagined.There was an accident.With nowhere to go, no way out, and no one to save her, Ava alone must confront the nightmare that is now reality. Views: 842
STEREO 2.0From the waters Death changes everything.The first Tin Universe story released once again with a new edit and revision.In search for a future, humanity must face the darkness.For fans of Battlestar Galactica, Stargate Universe and Dark Matter comes the first episode in Legacy, a fast-paced, action-packed, and gritty sci-fi series, by author Kurt Petrey.A group of strangers wake to an unfamiliar place with more questions than answers. When Joshua wakes, he finds himself trapped. Dark and unfamiliar, the almost completely destroyed facility has clearly been through a catastrophic event. He must unite the others to solve what has happened. Who put them there? How can they get out? If they cannot work together, they risk losing more than just their own lives.One reviewer wrote, "This book finished before it got started. Can't wait for the next in the series. The plot was different and the characters were starting to develop slowly and left me just wanting more. Left one wondering what was happening until almost the end. Really good light read." Views: 840
In February 2000, "Rolling Stone" magazine sent David Foster Wallace, "NOT A POLITICAL JOURNALIST, " on the road for a week with Senator John McCain's campaign to win the Republican nomination for the Presidency. They wanted to know why McCain appealed so much to so many Americans, and particularly why he appealed to the "Young Voters" of America who generally show nothing but apathy.
The "Director's Cut" (three times longer than the RS article) is an incisive, funny, thoughtful piece about life on "Bullshit One" -- the nickname for the press bus that followed McCain's Straight Talk Express.
This piece becomes ever more relevant, as we discuss what we know, don't know, and don't want to know about the way our political campaigns work. Views: 840
A young woman returns to the place of her upbringing--to experience the past, present, and future as one.excerpt:The sky is black, the stars pinpricks of light surrounding all overhead. I whistle softly through my teeth for Midnight, wondering if he’ll hear, doubting he’ll come. Yet then suddenly I see his form moving towards me, darker in the darkness, stopping a way away to make sure it is in fact someone he knows and can trust to approach before closing further.He stands so close I can hear the breath escaping his nostrils. He touches his nose to my outstretched fingers, nuzzling my arm next, wanting the halved apple I hold in my other hand. I ask him if he’s been a good horse and does he really miss me, or just the apple, and he snorts once, impatiently, at the delay. So I give it to him, by halves, offering the apple on my upturned palm, feeling his eager lips on my skin as he takes it before backing quickly away, as if suddenly afraid he’s been baited and tricked. Poor Midnight, I think, knowing what he can perhaps only dimly suspect, that something is up. Tomorrow this time he’ll be gone from here. Views: 839
The David Foster Wallace Reader is a selection of David Foster Wallace's work, introducing readers to his humour, kindness, sweeping intellect and versatility as a writer.
A compilation from the one of the most original writers of our age, featuring:
· the very best of his fiction and non-fiction;
· previously unpublished writing
· and original contributions from 12 prominent authors and critics about his work
From classic short fiction to genre-defining reportage, this book is a must for new readers and confirmed David Foster Wallace fans alike'One of the most dazzling luminaries of contemporary American fiction' Sunday Times
'There are times, reading his work, when you get halfway through a sentence and gasp involuntarily, and for a second you feel lucky that there was, at least for a time, someone who could make sense like no other of what it is to be a human in our era' Daily Telegraph
'A prose magician, Mr. Wallace was capable of writing . . .about subjects from tennis to politics to lobsters, from the horrors of drug withdrawal to the small terrors of life aboard a luxury cruise ship, with humour and fervour and verve' Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
David Foster Wallace wrote the novels The Pale King, Infinite Jest, and The Broom of the System and three story collections. His nonfiction includes Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. He died in 2008. Views: 838
Raw Material [1923, as The Imposters:]
Mayhew [1923:]
German Harry [1924:]
The Happy Man [1924:]
The Dream [1924:]
In a Strange Land [1924:]
The Luncheon [1924:]
Salvatore [1924, as Salvatore the Fisherman:]
Home [1924, as Home from the Sea:]
Mr. Know-All [1925:]
The Escape [1925, as The Widow's Might:]
A Friend in Need [1925, as The Man Who Wouldn't Hurt a Fly:]
The Portrait of a Gentleman [1925, as The Code of a Gentleman:]
The End of the Flight [1926:]
The Judgement Seat [never published in magazine**:]
The Ant and the Grasshopper [1924:]
French Joe [1926, as Another Man Without a Country:]
The Man with the Scar [1925:]
The Poet [1925, as The Great Man:]
Louise [1925, as The Most Selfish Woman I Ever Knew:]
The Closed Shop [1926:]
The Promise [1925, as An Honest Woman:]
A String of Beads [1927, as Pearls:]
The Bum [1929, as A Derelict:]
Straight Flush [1929:]
The Verger [1929, as The Man Who Made His Mark:]
The Wash Tub [1929, as In Hiding:]
The Social Sense [1929, as The Extraordinary Sex:]
The Four Dutchmen [1928: Views: 836
An alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here.
Joyce Carol Oates adds to her extraordinary body of work with this stunning novel of violence and love. At the heart of the story are two people, Iris Courtney, who is white, and handsome Jinx Fairchild, the black basketball player who, in protecting Iris, kills a white man.
Iris is the only witness to the crime.
The two of them are growing up in the early 1950s in a New York industrial town where racial boundaries keep people apart - or bring them together in explosive scenes of fear or desire. The secret link between Iris and Jinx is not only their attraction to each other, but a murder...and a bond of passion and guilt is formed between them. How this one irrevocable, tragic act shapes their lives and alters their destinies becomes Joyce Carol Oate's finest, emotion-packed novel - a work the critics are calling a masterpiece, the best work of America's best writer of contemporary realism. Views: 835
This manifesto proposes a universal way to encourage socially beneficial behaviour. There are more things wrong with our world than institutional indifference to social good. However, solving this issue could have a positive impact on other problems.In developed countries, social cohesion has been sacrificed on the altar of individual gratification. Individuals wanted more and better. Inventors and entrepreneurs rallied to serve our desires. We progressed – pulled along by our hunger for improvement. This strategy worked well for centuries. Survival rates benefitted more from technological advances than from recognising individual social contributions. But the paths of ‘what we want in the short term’ and ‘what is good for us in the long term’ diverged. As we moved forwards, we increasingly abandoned non-commercial activities – regardless of their contribution to social wellbeing.We’ve now reached point where the benefits of technological advances are becoming outweighed by the disadvantages. New consumer inventions make us less active. Improved food production is turning us fat. Social media is stopping us socialising. Even medical advances will become less important to the majority – focusing, quite rightly, on a shrinking minority of ill people or providing more years of relative infirmity for the very old.The wellbeing of the majority during the majority of their lives can now be improved more by positive social interaction than by technological advances. To do this, we need to amend our reward system. We need to provide additional motivation for carrying out beneficial social activity. Although many already help others altruistically, there’s no moral reason why they shouldn’t receive further tangible rewards. And tangible rewards might encourage even more people to help one another. This would deliver additional social benefits – thereby improving general wellbeing. Views: 835
A new kind of justice is comingTexas Ranger Justin Graves and his rebellious daughter, Christy, are dead, both murdered by her drug-dealer boyfriend. Blaming himself for her life of crime, Justin makes a deal with the devil to save her soul: one hundred bad guys in exchange for her pardon from hell. Now, in his rotting corpse, he returns from the grave to deliver the devil his dues.In this free Justin Graves short story, meet a couple of likeable accessories to murder, Rottweiler brothers King and Cong, whose master has had enough of his wife’s hateful belittling. He devises what he believes to be the perfect crime based on years of watching television crime shows and noting the mistakes other killers had made that got them busted. Problem is, he doesn’t know about Justin Graves and his uncanny investigative skills. Views: 835
When a ransom demand arrives for a planet’s name, the inhabitants realise they can no longer remember it. What will they do to get it back?A 2300 word Science Fiction short story...."Th' man who wrote it was presumably fine t'do," ah remarked, indeavo'in' t'imitate mah companion's processes. "Such paper c'd not be bought unner ha'f a crown a packet. It is peekoolyarly strong an' stiff." "Peculiar--dat be de real wo'd," said Holmes. "It be not an English sheet at all. Hold it down t'de light. Man!"...The story is an unique version of Conan Doyle's "A Scandal in Bohemia" created with the help of Dialectizer. We bet you've never read before Sherlock Holmes talking Jive or Doctor Watson talking Redneck. This version will help you to look at "A Scandal in Bohemia" from an unexpected angle and to appreciate it more. No offense to people who talk featured dialects intended. Views: 833
Eking out an existence as a scavenger in post-apocalyptic Russia, Ryska never thought she would be more than a blind, discarded military experiment. Then she ends up in the middle of a kidnapping gone wrong and must use her all her skills to save herself, and the young boy who brings back painful memories of her past.This is a science fiction short story.Eking out an existence as a scavenger in post-apocalyptic Russia, Ryska never thought she would be more than a blind, discarded military experiment. Then she ends up in the middle of a kidnapping gone wrong and must use her all her skills to save herself, and the young boy who brings back painful memories of her past.This is a science fiction short story that originally appeared in the anthology Mirror Shards: Volume One. Views: 831
“The Wedding of Zein” unfolds in the same village on the upper Nile where Tayeb Salih’s tragic masterpiece Season of Migration to the North is set. Here, however, the story that emerges through the overlapping, sometimes contradictory voices of the villagers is comic. Zein is the village idiot, and everyone in the village is dumbfounded when the news goes around that he will be getting married—Zein the freak, Zein who burst into laughter the moment he was born and has kept women and children laughing ever since, Zein who lost all his teeth at six and whose face is completely hairless, Zein married at last? Zein’s particular role in the life of the village has been the peculiar one of falling in love again and again with girls who promptly marry another man. It would be unheard of for him to get married himself.
In Tayeb Salih’s wonderfully agile telling, the story of how this miracle came to be is one that engages the tensions that exist in the village, or indeed in any community: tensions between the devout and the profane, the poor and the propertied, the modern and the traditional. In the end, however, Zein’s ridiculous good luck augurs an ultimate reconciliation, opening a prospect of a world made whole.
Salih’s classic novella appears here with two of his finest short stories, “The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid” and “A Handful of Dates.” Views: 831
Translated and with a preface by Mark Harman
Left unfinished by Kafka in 1922 and not published until 1926, two years after his death, The Castle is the haunting tale of K.’s relentless, unavailing struggle with an inscrutable authority in order to gain access to the Castle. Scrupulously following the fluidity and breathlessness of the sparsely punctuated original manuscript, Mark Harman’s new translation reveals levels of comedy, energy, and visual power previously unknown to English language readers. Views: 831
