Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent. Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it, in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.

    

    Scott Fitzgerald, will surprise and delight. Thank You for the Light is a masterfully crafted story—spare, strange, and wonderful, albeit a departure from Fitzgerald’s usual style.A widowed, corset saleswoman, Mrs. Hanson, whose chief pleasure in life is cigarettes, discovers that social disapproval of smoking is widespread in her new sales territory. Deprived of this simple comfort, she receives solace, and a light, from an unexpected source. Fitzgerald originally submitted the story to The New Yorker in 1936, four years before his death, but it was rejected. The editors said that it was “altogether out of the question” and added, “It seems to us so curious and so unlike the kind of thing we associate with him and really too fantastic.” Almost eighty years later, Fitzgerald’s grandchildren found the story among his papers and the Fitzgerald scholar James West encouraged them to send the story to the magazine once again. This time around the magazine decided to publish it, and now it is available in this special eBook edition.

    

    It was subsequently included in The Son of the Wolf, a story collection published in 1900.The White Silence is set in the unforgiving winter landscape of Yukon Territory, Canada. The story chronicles the travels of three people across the Northland Trail on the Yukon, as they try to reach civilization before spring. The story deals with the fragile relationship between man and nature, and also between man and animal. Its title is a phrase that London used frequently in his descriptions of the frozen northern landscapes in his stories.

    Rose was about to go into the classroom, where she’d left her purse, when she saw a sign on the door—a crude sign in pencil, on a ragged sheet of paper. “Collapse of Western Civilization — Dr. Norbert Beilstein,” it said. “Visitors welcome.”Previously unpublished, Slice of Life—about a college coed’s winter-induced dream—is an early testament to Kurt Vonnegut’s original voice and curious imagination. Cover design by Adil Dara.

    Each book in the series has been designed with today's young reader in mind. As the words come to life, students will develop a lasting appreciation for great literature.The humor of Mark Twain...the suspense of Edgar Allan Poe...the danger of Jack London...the sensitivity of Katherine Mansfield. Creative Short Stories has it all and will prove to be a welcome addition to any library.

    Le Guin is renowned for her spare, elegant prose, rich characterization, and diverse worlds. "Semley's Necklace" is a short story originally published in the collection The Wind's Twelve Quarters.

    SpaceshipPiper in the Woods

    One night, a carload of strangers appears on the Hollands' property, carrying the air of incipient danger underneath a veneer of pleasantries. Weldon finds himself inexplicably drawn to the group of trespassing vagabonds—who, despite being camped out on a hidden riverbank in the middle of nowhere, drive the most expensive automobile that Weldon has ever seen. In the unbearable, rainless heat of a Dust Bowl summer, Weldon will find himself mixed up in an encounter with the infamous bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde—an encounter that changes the course of Weldon's life…and history itself. Rich with criminal and social history of the American West and a young boy’s struggle to become a man, “A Dust Bowl Tale of Bonnie and Clyde” is just the beginning of Weldon Holland’s story.

    And a secret objective leads to more than the lead character, tech-priest Magos Caul, could ever have bargained for.THE STORYOn the world of Phaedra, a force of skitarii - the front-line soldiers of the Adeptus Mechanicus - embark upon a dangerous mission: to assault a stronghold of the xenos tau and recover a priority asset for their tech-priest master, Magos Caul. As they face the diminutive drones and hulking battlesuits of their alien foes in the jungles of the Dolorosa Coil, their target draws nearer. But just what is Objective Skysight, and why is it so important to the tech-priest?

    Taut and powerful, it is a keen reimagining of a whodunit in which everyone is implicated and no one is safe. It’s the summer of 1976 on the South Shore of Massachusetts. The Bicentennial is a season-long celebration, and flags are everywhere, snapping in the seaside winds, ironed onto T-shirts, tattooed into biceps. Tim O’Connor works the Cigarette Game booth at Funland—toss a quarter placed on an eight-sided ball into the right slot and you win two packs of smokes or maybe, if you’re lucky, a carton. If asked his age, he’d say he’s seventeen, but in truth he’s fourteen. Yet the kids in blue-collar Grantham—a town first imagined by Haigh in her devastating bestseller "Faith"—grow up fast, are known for being wild, and more often than not drop out of school to punch the clock at the nearby Raytheon plant. When Tim disappears after the park’s closing one night, no one makes much of it till late morning. It’s not the first time his mother, Kay, has forgotten to pick him up. It’s not the first time he has stayed out all night. By the time local cops begin their investigation, there is little trace of the boy, only witnesses to a complicated set of relationships in a place where surviving isn’t always thriving and where disappointment mixes with the salt in the air. In this superbly crafted story, the search for a missing boy becomes a search for the American dream, laying bare how destructive its promises often are. Recalling Dennis Lehane in setting and subject and masters like Graham Greene and Richard Ford in tone and style, Haigh’s latest work is a testament to all that short fiction can be. It’s a searing portrait of how much a community loses when one of its own is lost.

    Not everyone can. Who decides? Desperate to save his daughter from a mysterious sickness, Daniel applies for the Methuselah Treatment. If she gets it, his daughter won’t just recover, she’ll live forever. But the drug is tightly controlled, and only the special, the talented, and the truly deserving ever receive it. There is nothing special about Daniel’s destitute ten- year-old girl—or is there?

    Broken Things is the exciting short story prequel to Jodi's new novel, Wish You Were HereNine-year-old Diana keeps a tally of every day her mother is gone, counting down until she will see her again. A world-renowned photographer, Hannah O'Toole is rarely at home, always travelling the globe, chasing the next disaster. She has missed most of Diana's birthdays, so Diana isn't surprised when her mother announces she will be photographing the effects of a drought in Oklahoma instead of staying in New York for Diana's tenth birthday. Diana is thrilled when her father decides to take her for a surprise visit to spend her birthday with her mother, but she can't fail to see that her mother isn't quite as excited. And when the drought is unexpectedly broken by a Force 4 tornado, Hannah must make a choice between her daughter and her passion.

    This story was originally published in the Black Library Games Day Anthology 2012.