Years ago, a woman stood in front of me and read out Manto. Siyah Hashiye shouldn’t be translated as Black Borders, she said. Tainted Margins. Another woman, years later, looked plainly at me and asked if people still slept on…
QuoVadis met the light at seventeen after rolling his truck into a drainage ditch. Shards of teeth and chipped glass scattered around him, all soaking up the same amount of light. The pull of beer through his veins and leak…
“It seems alive.” These words, uttered in a tone of awe, were the ones most often said when someone saw her work. But the automatist knew that what she did was a counterfeit of life, not a creation of it.…
Though if it were, things would appear brighter, at first glance. For instance: you would be that girl who is very smart and very pretty and never has to shave her legs because body hair is too fine a detail…
Doting father who undermined scientific thought with the idea of slow change in a fast world, would he have given his eldest daughter a hand lens or a dance card when she came of age? Annie Darwin died young and…
There are seventeen parties a year. This is number fifteen. There are two left. There are seventeen parties a year. And there are only two left. You’ve gone to fifteen parties, and no one has talked to you. Except for…
The exact definition of neo-soul may not be clear, but one thing is: Alicia Keys is not neo-soul. Neo-soul, a loosely-defined subgenre of R&B that arose in the 1990s, has very conscious roots in funk and soul, as well as…
In these last and terrible days there’s still a kind of perfection in choosing the moment of one’s death. Drona hears your name spoken and detaches himself from his body. From this moment on, he is pure intelligence. You call…
An email, from Virginia to Robert: “They’re tearing the house down next Monday.” He closed the file he was working on and called her on the phone. “Hey, Ginny.” “Hey, Bobby. What are you doing this weekend?” “This is Whitemantle…
Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction is a unique and very interstitial writing guide that uses original images and visual exercises to educate and inspire. The book won the 2014 British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Non-Fiction,…
