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  Daily Jobs Coffee and an Awfully...

  Tao Wong

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  Some Adventures Begin and End Small  
     
  Life after the Apocalypse is one daily grind after another. It's a good thing for Wendy that she's got friends. A lot of friends as a fairy summoner. But life in Exeter is not easy, even for a summoner and the grind of daily jobs and never-ending quests is getting to her. She's got one shot at getting a place for her own, a place of safety and maybe getting ahead. But it'll require Wendy to do the one thing she swore she'd never do again.  
     
  Fight monsters.  
     
  This is a short in the System Apocalypse universe, featuring a new character in Exeter, UK.

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  Memorandum

  Quah Sy Ren, Hee Wai Siam

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  Featuring new translations of previously untranslated Chinese short stories, Memorandum maps out seven decades of Sinophone Singaporean Literature. From bargirls to student activists, from trishaw men to tea merchants, this collection provides a glimpse into a world that has been previously invisible to Anglophone readers. Paired with critical essays, these stories showcase the richness and diversity of Singapore’s Chinese community, but also its inherent interconnectedness with other cultures within Singapore. 
   
  “Memorandum is a pathbreaking anthology that refracts over half a century of Singapore’s history through its lens. The translated stories do much more than simply bridge Sinophone and Anglophone worlds: they actively cross geographical, cultural, linguistic and class boundaries, causing us to think more deeply about the nature of social power, and the transformative interventions literary texts can make.” 
  -Philip Holden, scholar of Singapore &Southeast Asian literatures

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  Jane Eyre

  Charlotte Brontë

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  Jane Eyre originally published as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography) is a novel by the English writer Charlotte Brontë. It was published under her pen name "Currer Bell" on 19 October 1847 by Smith, Elder & Co. of London. The first American edition was published the following year by Harper & Brothers of New York. Jane Eyre is a Bildungsroman that follows the experiences of its eponymous heroine, including her growth to adulthood and her love for Mr Rochester, the brooding master of Thornfield Hall.The novel revolutionized prose fiction by being the first to focus on its protagonist's moral and spiritual development through an intimate first-person narrative, where actions and events are coloured by psychological intensity. Charlotte Brontë has been called the "first historian of the private consciousness", and the literary ancestor of writers like Marcel Proust and James Joyce.

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  One Summer Night - From their...

  Ambrose Bierce

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  Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was born on 24th June 1842 at Horse Cave Creek in Meigs County, Ohio. His parents were poor but they introduced him to literature at an early age, instilling in him a deep appreciation of books, the written word and the elegance of language.  
  Growing up in Koscuisko County, Indiana poverty and religion were defining features of his childhood, and he would later describe his parents as “unwashed savages” and fanatically religious, showing him little affection but always quick to punish. He came to resent religion, and his introduction to literature appears to be their only positive effect. 
  At age 15 Bierce left home to become a printer’s devil, mixing ink and fetching type at The Northern Indian, a small Ohio paper. Falsely accused of theft he returned to his farm and spent time sending out work in the hopes of being published. 
  His Uncle Lucius advised he be sent to the Kentucky Military Institute. A year later he was commissioned as an Officer.  As the Civil War started Bierce enlisted in the 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment.  
  In April 1862 Bierce fought at the Battle of Shiloh, an experience which, though terrifying, became the source of several short stories. Two years later he sustained a serious head wound and was off duty for several months. He was discharged in early 1865.  
  A later expedition to inspect military outposts across the Great Plains took him all the way to San Francisco. He remained there to become involved with publishing and editing and to marry, Mary Ellen on Christmas Day 1871.  They had a child, Day, the following year.  
  In 1872 the family moved to England for 3 years where he wrote for Fun magazine. His son, Leigh, was born, and first book, ‘The Fiend’s Delight’, was published.  
  They returned to San Francisco and to work for a number of papers where he gained admiration for his crime reporting. In 1887 he began a column at the William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner.  
  Bierce’s marriage fell apart when he discovered compromising letters to his wife from a secret admirer. The following year, 1889 his son Day committed suicide, depressed by romantic rejection. 
  In 1891 Bierce wrote and published the collection of 26 short stories which included ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’.  Success and further works including poetry followed.  
  Bierce with Hearst’s resources helped uncover a financial plot by a railroad to turn 130 million dollars of loans into a handout. Confronted by the railroad and asked to name his price Bierce answered “my price is $130 million dollars. If, when you are ready to pay, I happen to be out of town, you may hand it over to my friend, the Treasurer of the United States”.  
  He now began his first foray as a fabulist, publishing ‘Fantastic Fables’ in 1899.  But tragedy again struck two years later when his second son Leigh died of pneumonia relating to his alcoholism.  
  He continued to write short stories and poetry and also published ‘The Devil’s Dictionary’.  
  At the age of 71, in 1913 Bierce departed from Washington, D.C., for a tour of the battlefields where he had fought during the civil war. At the city of Chihuahua he wrote his last known communication, a letter to a friend. It’s closing words were “as to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination,” Ambrose Bierce then vanished without trace.

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  The Remarkable Rocket - From...

  Oscar Wilde

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  Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on the 16th October 1854 in Dublin, Ireland.  The son of Dublin intellectuals Oscar proved himself an outstanding classicist at Trinity College and then at Oxford. 
  Wilde then moved to London and its fashionable cultural and social circles.  With his biting wit, flamboyant dress, and glittering conversation, Wilde became one of the most well-known personalities of his day. 
  His only novel, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ was published in 1890 and he then moved on to writing for the stage with ‘Salome’ in 1891.  His society comedies were enormous hits and turned him into one of the most successful writers of late Victorian London. 
  Whilst his masterpiece, ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, was on stage in London, Wilde had the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, prosecuted for libel.  The trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and trial for gross indecency. He was convicted and imprisoned for two years hard labour. It was to break him. 
  On release he left for France. There he wrote his last work, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ in 1898.  He died destitute in Paris at the age of forty-six sipping champagne a friend had brought with the line ‘Alas I am dying beyond my means’.

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  The Beautiful and Damned

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

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  The Beautiful and Damned is a powerful and haunting novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald that explores the glamour, excess, and moral decay of America's Jazz Age. First published in 1922, the novel traces the rise and fall of a young, privileged couple whose lives are shaped by wealth, ambition, and self-indulgence.
  
  Anthony Patch, a Harvard graduate and heir to a vast fortune, and his wife Gloria Gilbert, a stunning and spirited socialite, embody beauty, confidence, and youthful promise. Together, they drift through a world of parties, luxury, and idle dreams, convinced that success and happiness are inevitable. Yet as the years pass, their reliance on inherited wealth and fleeting pleasure begins to erode their sense of purpose, discipline, and love.
  
  Through lyrical prose and sharp social observation, Fitzgerald examines themes of greed, entitlement, marriage, and the corrosive effects of materialism. The novel exposes the emptiness beneath a life devoted to pleasure and the quiet tragedy of wasted potential. As Anthony and Gloria wait for fortune to secure their future, time slips away, revealing the devastating cost of complacency and moral neglect.
  
  The Beautiful and Damned is both a romantic tragedy and a biting critique of a generation intoxicated by wealth and status. Rich in emotional depth and psychological insight, the novel stands as one of Fitzgerald's most honest portrayals of the Jazz Age and remains a timeless meditation on ambition, love, and the consequences of living without purpose.

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