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Introduction: Ray Guns Tucked into Tweed Jackets – Ryan Britt
Sometime after you stopped saying Where the Wild Things Are was your favorite book, your next favorite book wasn’t a work of “serious” literature. Literary criticism is neither a dominant nor recessive genetic trait, meaning your ability to recognize differences between “genre fiction” and “regular fiction” is an unnatural contrivance hoisted upon you by society! So, if you claim your first favorite book was something you had to read in school or a novel from “the canon,” you’re a big fat liar.
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High Five – James Hannaham
You killed Tatiana because you were jealous, didn’t you, Tiffany Savage. You seethed over her top-notch manicurist, her platinum rings and bracelets encrusted with lapis lazuli, her Moroccan leather gloves. You despised her ability to take it all for granted, casually cupping Fortunoff snifters at the ball of her thumb, letting Matilda smooth exotic cremes across her knuckles. But even more than the amenities, you coveted her unfathomably successful modeling career.
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Birthday Buyer – Etgar Keret
There once was a rich man. A very rich man. Too rich, some said. Many years ago he invented something, or stole the invention from someone. It was so long ago that even he didn’t remember. But that invention was sold to a giant conglomerate for a lot of money, and the man invested it all in land and water. On the land he bought, he built lots of tiny concrete cells that he sold to people who yearned for walls and a roof, and he bottled the water and sold it to thirsty people. When he finished selling everything at exorbitant prices, he went home to his enormous, very beautiful house and thought about what to do with all the money he’d made.
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Special Notice – DARPA
Stories exert a powerful influence on human thoughts and behavior. They consolidate memory, shape emotions, cue heuristics and biases in judgment, influence in-group/out- group distinctions, and may affect the fundamental contents of personal identity. It comes as no surprise that these influences make stories highly relevant to vexing security challenges such as radicalization, violent social mobilization, insurgency and terrorism, and conflict prevention and resolution. Therefore, understanding the role stories play in a security context is a matter of great import and some urgency.
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I Am the Ojo Insight 3 – Nelly Reifler
I am the Ojo Insight 3.8. I’m delighted to welcome you to my Beta rollout. I am a new node app, designed to extend functionality beyond that of the Insight 3.7 node app. As with your 3.7 Insight, I will maximize your strategic consciousness penetration strategies, and there are some new features that you will find exciting and innovative.
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I Stumble Into Everything: Interview with Jim Shepard – Travis Kurowski
Jim Shepard’s was the first story I ever read in a literary magazine; it was “Climb Aboard the Mighty Flea,” in a 2002 issue of The Paris Review. I found it in college while wandering around in the library between classes. The story is about a group of lunatic German Messerschmitt 163 test pilots during WWII.
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Dreamers, Again – Allegra Frazier
The house is larger than we expected. It rests in the side of a hill at the base of the mountains, with a clear view of the valley and at least a hundred yards of privacy before the next driveway. It’s clearly out of our price range. It doesn’t even look like a rental. I assume the place has been sectioned into multiple apartments, or the agent wants to show us a guest house in the back. The servant’s quarters.
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Sketchbook – Mike Hawthorne
Mike Hawthorne is an artist, designer, and cartoonist whose work has been nominated for Eisner and Harvey awards. He has drawn for FOX Films, Universal Studios, Marvel Comics, DC/Vertigo, Dark Horse Comics, and IDW Publishing, and has provided artwork for Deadpool, Action Comics, Fear Agent, Umbra, Queen and Country, and various other comics.
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Superman Watches Lois Lane Pull Weeds – Jason McCall
Yes, I am lucky; I’ll never have to die/on a treadmill, starve/myself into a cocktail dress. It doesn’t matter/if I wear a seatbelt or stare into the heart/of the sun (It’s just a dark lump, really)./That’s why I offer to cut onions, tackle/the wasp nests and ant hills/after I save Flash and Atom/from the latest Red Tornado rebellion.
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Platform, Position & Possibility: Magneto Speaks – Krista Franklin
We are gods. Our very thoughts could strip the axis from earth’s belly, take continents apart like dismantled puzzles. Humans are a blight, plague of flesh swept through. To serve them is ignorance, casting pearls among swine. May the heavens collapse on them, their fear be the noose that slips around their puny necks. Nature has ordained our genes to speak the supernatural. It is only this we should obey.
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The Cold Boy – Benjamin Percy
The forest is hardwood and the branches of the oaks and maples and sycamores and walnuts would have been bare except for the crows, hundreds of them, all huddled like little men in black cloaks. Together they make a rusty music—clicking their beaks and rustling their feathers and clawing the bark and hissing and muttering and cawing—that can be heard from some distance, at least a quarter mile away, across a snowy cornfield, where Ray stands on a frozen pond.
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El peligro de una sola historia – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Cuento historias. Y me gustaría contarles algunas historias personales sobre lo que llamo “el peligro de una sola historia”. Crecí en un campus universitario al este de Nigeria. Mi madre dice que comencé a leer a los dos años, creo que más bien fue a los cuatro años, a decir verdad. Fui una lectora precoz y lo que leía eran libros infantiles ingleses y estadounidenses.
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