The Litigation Master and the Monkey King - Lightspeed Magazine. The tiny cottage at the edge of Sanli Village—away from the villagers’ noisy houses and busy clan shrines and next to the cool pond filled with lily pads, pink lotus flowers, and playful carp—would have made an ideal romantic summer hideaway for some dissolute poet and his silk-robed mistress from nearby bustling Yangzhou. Indeed, having such a country lodge was the fashion among the literati in the lower Yangtze region in this second decade of the glorious reign of the Qianlong Emperor. Everyone agreed—as they visited each other in their vacation homes and sipped tea—that he was the best Emperor of the Qing Dynasty: so wise, so vigorous, and so solicitous of his subjects! And as the Qing Dynasty, founded by Manchu sages, was without a doubt the best dynasty ever to rule China, the scholars competed to compose poems that best showed their gratitude for having the luck to bear witness to this golden age, gift of the greatest Emperor who ever lived.
The morning began like any other. “But—” Mono no aware. The world is shaped like the kanji for umbrella, only written so poorly, like my handwriting, that all the parts are out of proportion. My father would be greatly ashamed at the childish way I still form my characters. Indeed, I can barely write many of them anymore. My formal schooling back in Japan ceased when I was only eight.
Yet for present purposes, this badly drawn character will do. The canopy up there is the solar sail. Even that distorted kanji can only give you a hint of its vast size. Beneath it dangles a long cable of carbon nanotubes a hundred kilometers long: strong, light, and flexible. The light from the sun pushes against the sail, propelling us on an ever widening, ever accelerating, spiraling orbit away from it.
Our trajectory takes us toward a star called 61 Virginis. There are no windows in the habitat module, no casual view of the stars streaming past. “Hiroto,” Dad said as he shook me awake. My small suitcase was ready. “Attention, citizens of Kurume! “Mrs. “Mr. 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Physics Fiction: Quantum Shorts 2015 Winner - Scientific American Blog Network. Scientific American partnered on a writing contest for science fiction short stories inspired by the realm of quantum physics Clara Moskowitz The bizarre quantum rules that govern the microscopic universe sometimes seem more like fiction than fact, even to physicists.
To capitalize on the fantastic aspects of quantum mechanics, the 2015 Quantum Shorts competition solicited short stories inspired by quantum physics. Scientific American partnered with the Center for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore, which sponsored the competition, and we’re proud to announce the 2015 winners. First prize in the Open Category goes to Ana by Liam Hogan. The People’s Choice winner, decided by popular vote online, is The Qubits of College Acceptance by Lily Turaski, which equates an unopened envelope of letters from colleges to the box containing Schrödinger's cat. We’re thrilled to share these creative and scientifically stimulating stories with you. “Why don’t you not look?” Zoetrope: All-Story: Back Issue. When I tell our husbands the story of the bad-luck Americans, I begin with Edith because when the Americans came, moving into the airstrip out of town, expanding it with new buildings and sheds and hangars, bringing with them a brass band that practiced in the streets of a Saturday, I thought of the planes that hummed over our newly crowded sky as tiny Ediths with their parrot faces pointed toward the sun.
Edith was a short woman, short enough maybe to count as a dwarf, and from the back she looked like our kid brothers. From the front she was about sixty and looked like a parrot. Her lips were pale and hard and fused. Her eyes were small and dark. Our father had sold the farm but the pond was still ours, sitting down the slope from the house, half hidden among trees in the low folds of the beginnings of the hills. At first we noticed the Americans only in town. Because they hadn't been buried, the souls of the eight dead airmen began to cause trouble in the area. The Size of Things. I knew that Enrique Duvel had inherited a lot of money, and also that, though he was sometimes spotted with women, he still lived with his mother. On Sundays, he cruised around the plaza in his convertible, self-absorbed, never looking at or greeting any of his neighbors, and then he’d disappear until the following weekend.
I’d kept the toy store I’d inherited from my father, and one day I caught Duvel in the street, peering dubiously in through the display window of my shop. I mentioned this to Mirta, my wife, who said that maybe I’d got him confused with someone else. But then she saw him herself. The first time he came inside, he seemed irresolute, as though he were ashamed and not at all sure what he was looking for.
He came back several days later. On successive visits, he bought model cars, ships, and trains. “Duvel? He made a confused gesture. “It’s best if I stay here,” he said. “Here? We stood there looking at each other, not quite knowing what to say. He nodded. “Enrique!” “Buttony” The children wanted to play Buttony. “All right,” Miss Lewis said, and she clapped her hands five times, in the rhythm that meant they must be quiet and copy her. They were quiet and copied her.
“All right,” she said, with that smile she reserved for the sleepy, silly midafternoon. “We’ll play. The button lay in a special tin in the right-hand corner of Miss Lewis’s top drawer. All the children handled the button with reverence, but none more so than Joseph. “Close the drawer, Joseph,” she said, because she found she liked nothing better, after admiring him, after giving him the opportunity to be admired, than to gently suggest a mundane task.
They always played Buttony outside. “Quietly, quietly!” They gathered under the jacaranda tree. “Put out your hands,” Miss Lewis said, and the children lifted their cupped hands. “Close your eyes,” Miss Lewis said, closing her own eyes. “Buttony, Buttony,” twenty-one times. “Open your eyes,” Miss Lewis said. “You start, Miranda,” Miss Lewis said. The Bath Raymond Carver. Fly Already. P.T. sees him first. We’re on our way to the park to play ball when he suddenly says, “Daddy, look!” His head is tilted back and he’s squinting hard to see something far above me, and before I can even begin to imagine an alien spaceship or a piano about to fall on our heads my gut tells me that something really bad is happening. But, when I turn to see what P.T. is looking at, all I notice is an ugly, four-story building covered in plaster and dotted with air-conditioners, as if it had some kind of skin disease.
The sun is hanging directly above it, blinding me, and as I’m trying to get a better angle I hear P.T. say, “He wants to fly.” Now I can see a guy in a white button-down shirt standing on the roof railing looking down at me, and, behind me, P.T. whispers, “Is he a superhero?” Instead of answering him, I shout at the guy, “Don’t do it!” The guy just stares at me. I shout again, “Don’t do it, please! “What?” I have it a lot at work. I want to tell the guy on the roof all this. Signal. I tried to give the children an etiquette lesson while we were waiting at King’s Cross on December 30th. “You aren’t allowed to ask for the Wi-Fi password before you say hello,” I said. “That’s the main thing.” “Uncle Mike won’t care,” said Toby, who was nine. “He’s nice,” said Mia, who was seven. “Both of those things are true,” I said. “Uncle Mike is nice, and he wouldn’t care, but this is a life lesson. “Fear? Michael wasn’t my oldest friend and he wasn’t my closest friend, but he was older than any of the ones who were closer and closer than any of the ones who were older, so he had a special status, as part of the furniture of my life, the kind of friend who when you’re asked how you met you have to think for a while to remember.
He’d drifted through Cambridge doing something scientific—engineering or maths, I think it was. This was shaping up to be another of those occasions. The trip up north felt like punishment for our hubristic attempt to change holiday routine. “Yep,” I said. The I.O.U. The above is not my real name—the fellow it belongs to gave me his permission to sign it to this story. My real name I shall not divulge. I am a publisher. I accept long novels about young love written by old maids in South Dakota, detective stories concerning wealthy clubmen and female apaches with “wide dark eyes,” essays about the menace of this and that and the color of the moon in Tahiti by college professors and other unemployed.
I accept no novels by authors under fifteen years old. All the columnists and communists (I can never get these two words straight) abuse me because they say I want money. I do—I want it terribly. Six months ago I contracted for a book that was undoubtedly a sure thing. Dr. For ninety days we prepared for publication. Four weeks before the day set for publication, huge crates went out to a thousand points of the literate compass. The actual number of books in the first printing was three hundred thousand. The date set was April 15th. He looked up. “What?” Sapiens A Brief History of Humankind,Yuval Noah Harari.pdf. Solstice. It was the year’s turning. These few hours like the blink of a great eye—just enough light to check that the world is still there, before shutting back down.
Sometime in the midafternoon, he had an impulse to go home, or go somewhere, and when he lifted his head, of course, it was dark outside. It just felt wrong. Two hours later, he was in the multi-story looking for his car and he couldn’t find the thing. Out there, it was Christmas, but he did not think it was Christmas inside the multi-story, the only place in Dublin that had no fairy lights. It felt like the end of things. Or this year, he thought, it might not bother. The M50 was at a crawl, and there was the usual nightmare getting off at the Tallaght exit. A full forty minutes later, the dual carriageway turned into the old Blessington Road, and oncoming traffic shot by so close he flinched in the glare of the lights. It gave him a fright.
The night was very big out here. When home? “What’s that?” “Just,” she says. “You think?” Samsa in Love. He woke to discover that he had undergone a metamorphosis and become Gregor Samsa. He lay flat on his back on the bed, looking at the ceiling. It took time for his eyes to adjust to the lack of light. The ceiling seemed to be a common, everyday ceiling of the sort one might find anywhere. Once, it had been painted white, or possibly a pale cream. Years of dust and dirt, however, had given it the color of spoiled milk.
It had no ornament, no defining characteristic. No argument, no message. There was a tall window on one side of the room, to his left, but its curtain had been removed and thick boards nailed across the frame. Still on his back, he slowly turned his head and examined the rest of the room. The room had perhaps once served as a normal bedroom. Samsa had no idea where he was, or what he should do. The moment he began contemplating that question, however, something like a black column of mosquitoes swirled up in his head. In any case, he had to learn how to move his body. Free Magic Realism Short Stories and Books. It's that time of year again. Time for the second Magic Realism Bloghop and this blog's second birthday. To start the bloghop here is my birthday present to you - a load of free magic realism.
Over the last year I have been gathering together links to places where you can read online or download magic realism. Most of the pieces are short stories, but there are a few full-length books in here. Some are samples from ebook collections of short stories, including four from the great Gabo himself (thank you Harper Collins).
(Cannot add links: Registration/trial expired) Salman Rushdie · The Prophet’s Hair · LRB 16 April 1981. Early in 19—, when Srinagar was under the spell of a winter so fierce it could crack men’s bones as if they were glass, a young man upon whose cold-pinked skin there lay, like a frost, the unmistakable sheen of wealth was to be seen entering the most wretched and disreputable part of the city, where the houses of wood and corrugated iron seemed perpetually on the verge of losing their balance, and asking in low, grave tones where he might go to engage the services of a dependably professional thief. The young man’s name was Atta, and the rogues in that part of town directed him gleefully into ever-darker and less public alleys, until in a yard wet with the blood of a slaughtered chicken he was set upon by two men whose faces he never saw, robbed of the substantial bank-roll which he had insanely brought on his solitary excursion, and beaten within an inch of his life.
Night fell. Breakfast ended; the family wished each other a fulfilling day. ‘Can you do it?’ The Shelter of the World. At dawn the haunting sandstone palaces of the new “victory city” of Akbar the Great looked as if they were made of red smoke. Most cities start giving the impression of being eternal almost as soon as they are born, but Sikri would always look like a mirage. As the sun rose to its zenith, the great bludgeon of the day’s heat pounded the flagstones, deafening human ears to all sounds, making the air quiver like a frightened blackbuck, and weakening the border between sanity and delirium, between what was fanciful and what was real.
Even the Emperor succumbed to fantasy. Queens floated within his palaces like ghosts, Rajput and Turkish sultanas playing catch-me-if-you-can. One of these royal personages did not really exist. The city was finished at last, in time for the Emperor’s fortieth birthday. No city is all palaces. Fortunately for the mud city, military matters often took Akbar away.
The country was at peace at last, but the King’s spirit was never calm. Were they wrong? “In the South” The day that Junior fell down began like any other day: the explosion of heat rippling the air, the trumpeting sunlight, the traffic’s tidal surges, the prayer chants in the distance, the cheap film music rising from the floor below, the loud pelvic thrusts of an “item number” dancing across a neighbor’s TV, a child’s cry, a mother’s rebuke, unexplained laughter, scarlet expectorations, bicycles, the newly plaited hair of schoolgirls, the smell of strong sweet coffee, a green wing flashing in a tree. Senior and Junior, two very old men, opened their eyes in their bedrooms on the fourth floor of a sea-green building on a leafy lane, just out of sight of Elliot’s Beach, where, that evening, the young would congregate, as they always did, to perform the rites of youth, not far from the village of the fisherfolk, who had no time for such frivolity.
The poor were puritans by night and day. As for the old, they had rites of their own and did not need to wait for evening. “No!” Junior said. If the Impressionists had been dentists by Woody Allen, 1978 - La Reine de Rien. Woody Allen: Count Dracula. The Kugelmass Episode - Side Effects :: Woody Allen. Mr Biggs and the boychick. Www.angelfire.com/blog2/endovelico/WoodyAllen-GettingEven.txt. Tails of Manhattan. The Whore of Mensa. "Ah Love! Ah Me!" by Max Steele, Collier's Weekly, Saturday, November 3rd, 1945 - UNZ.org. Max Steele (Author of The Cat and the Coffee Drinkers) Science fiction. Fantasy. The universe. And related subjects.
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings pdf. 'The Harvest' by Amy Hempel — Pif Magazine. Today Will Be A Quiet Day | TMR Content Archives. In the cemetery where al jolson is buried. Center of the Universe. Constructed Worlds. Chairman Spaceman. Paul McVeigh. Of Windows and Doors The New Yorker. Chairman Spaceman The New Yorker. Read 15 Amazing Works Of Fiction In Less Than 30 Minutes | The Huffington Post.
SIMON RICH: SCARED STRAIGHT (short Story) Sorry Dan, But It’s No Longer Necessary for a Human to Serve as CEO of This Company. - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Flash Fiction. And of Clay Are We Created Holt. Alice Munro: Dimension. The Book of Simon. Simon Rich. Hilarious jokes by Simon Rich: the funniest man we know | British GQ. The Life Story of a Condom. Premium Harmony. Herman Wouk Is Still Alive - Stephen King.
Woody Allen: Count Dracula. If the Impressionists had been dentists by Woody Allen, 1978 - La Reine de Rien. Liu the man who ended history. "For Want of a Nail" is a Hugo nominee! - Mary Robinette Kowal. The Kugelmass Episode - Side Effects :: Woody Allen. SIMON RICH: SCARED STRAIGHT (short Story) Gaiman, Neil Smoke and Mirrors (v1 html) Coover, Robert A Night at the Movies (css) v3.0. Hilarious jokes by Simon Rich: the funniest man we know | British GQ. [Story] | White-Bread Jesus, by Robert Coover. Coover babysitter. “Invasion of the Martians” Nighttime of the City - A Short Story by Robert Coover. EP345: The Paper Menagerie. Stories of Your Life and Others. Down to a Sunless Sea by Neil Gaiman | Books. The Frog Prince. Mono no aware by Ken Liu. Fiction: The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang. Io9.gizmodo. The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species. The Book Of Strange New Things - Wikipedia. The Long Haul From the ANNALS OF TRANSPORTATION, The Pacific Monthly, May 2009 by Ken Liu.
Eyes of a Blue Dog--Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928-2014) Neil Gaiman | Cool Stuff | Short Stories | How To Talk To Girls At Parties | How To Talk To Girls At Parties (Text) Read Ken Liu's amazing story that swept the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. One of These Days--Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928-2014) De-Evolution. Eva Is Inside Her Cat--Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928-2014) “A Death”
Nobel Prize 2013: Alice Munro exclusive story - Telegraph. 100 Great Short Stories. A Pair of Silk Stockings by Kate Chopin. Man From the South--Roald Dahl (1916-1990) Amundsen. Vanilla bright like Eminem. All Summer in a Day By Ray Bradbury, a misc. books fanfic. Vanilla bright like Eminem. Cassandra by Ken Liu. Allen Steele - "Emperor of Mars" Gooseberries, by Anton Chekhov, 1898. Town of Cats.
George Saunders: Sea Oak. Short Story.