She thought, brightly, This is the worst life decision I have ever made! And she marvelled at herself for a while, at the mystery of this person who'd just done this bizarre, inexplicable thing.
Ken Liu's incredible story "Paper Menagerie" just became the first work of fiction to win all three of SF's major awards: the Hugo, the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award. And we're proud to be able t…
Set in the early twentieth century Kolkata, Kabuliwala delicately explores the bonds of friendship, affection and parting in the relationship between a middle-aged Pathan trader and a five year old Be…
'The fact is, if we followed the history of every little country in the world - in its dramatic as well as its quiet times - we would have no space left in which to live our own lives or apply ourselv…
“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” is a short story that begins with a couple, Pelayo and Elisenda, finding a very old man in their courtyard during a stormy afternoon. They watch in astonishment th…
In a small American town, the local residents are abuzz with excitement and nervousness when they wake on the morning of the twenty-seventh of June. Everything has been prepared for the town’s annual …
A short story from James Joyce's Dubliners. The unnamed protagonist in "Araby" is a boy who is just starting to come into his sexual identity. Through his first-person narration, we are immersed at th…
The Medium is the Massage is Marshall McLuhan's most condensed, and perhaps most effective, presentation of his ideas. Using a layout style that was later copied by Wired, McLuhan and coauthor/designe…
La Belle Dame sans Merci (French: "The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy") is a ballad written by the English poet John Keats. It exists in two versions, with minor differences between them. The original w…
When Prince Oroonoko's passion for the virtuous Imoinda arouses the jealousy of his grandfather, the lovers are cast into slavery and transported from Africa to the colony of Surinam. Oroonoko's noble…
The sixties and seventies witnessed the emergence of Joyce Carol Oates as one of America's foremost writers of the short story. In 1962, 'The Fine White Mist of Winter, ' composed when the author was …
A beautiful, arresting short story by Toni Morrison—the only one she ever wrote—about race and the relationships that shape us through life, with an introduction by Zadie Smith.
Widely admired for its vivid accounts of the slave trade, Olaudah Equiano's autobiography -- the first slave narrative to attract a significant readership -- reveals many aspects of the eighteenth-cen…
