Series
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar: A Sacred, Surreal Quest for Belonging
What does it mean to live a life worth dying for? This haunting question echoes through every page of Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel, Martyr!—a work that defies easy categorization. At once a lyrical meditation on identity and a surreal odyssey through grief, addiction, and faith, Martyr! is a novel that dares to stare into the divine. It’s bold, wildly original, and brimming with emotional intelligence.
By Hamad Haider8 months ago in Fiction
Selis Weaver - The Threadkeeper
The town of Haverford thrived in the quiet spaces between fortune and hardship. The wind carried the scents of fresh bread and tilled earth through the streets of Haverford, weaving between market stalls and bustling townsfolk. To most, the town was a simple place, hardworking, unremarkable, shaped by the ebb and flow of fortune. But one among them saw beyond the surface, beyond chance, beyond the unpredictable turns of life. Selis Weaver saw deeper. She did not believe in luck, nor chance, nor randomness. She believed in the weave, the intricate pattern of fate that bound every soul together. And she was its keeper.
By Canyon Cappola (TheNomad)8 months ago in Fiction
The Village That Answered No One
THE VILLAGE THAT ANSWERED NO ONE Written by Haroon Bahramzai Somewhere in the fog-soaked valleys of northern Europe, tucked between two forested hills where GPS signals fade and birds fly cautiously, there once stood a village called Eld hollow.
By Haroon Bahramzai8 months ago in Fiction
The Garden of Mirrors: A Tale of Two Thrones
Part I: The Echoes of the Orchard In an ancient land where rivers whispered secrets and mountains bore silent witness to time, there existed two mighty kingdoms, separated by a sea of sand and centuries of silence. One was Zahran, a land veiled in mist, where the people believed that dreams were fragments of lost truths. The other was Elburz, whose people trusted only what the eye could see and the hand could hold.
By Muhammad Abdullah8 months ago in Fiction
Don't Look At My Face, I'm Hideous
If you suspect there's something hideously wrong with your face, it's tempting to look at your reflection to reassure yourself everything is fine. That you are actually no more ghastly than normal. The trick is to avoid doing that until you're somewhere that you can process the information.
By L.C. Schäfer8 months ago in Fiction
Plato in the Wasteland
“We were born in the vault. We died in the vault.” — Fallout This haunting line from the videogame Fallout 3 encapsulates more than just a fictional setting; it echoes a philosophical idea, first articulated over two thousand years ago by Plato in his famous Allegory of the Cave. In this thought experiment, Plato describes a group of prisoners confined since birth in a dark cave, chained in place and forced to stare at a wall. Behind them burns a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners, puppeteers cast shadows on the wall. These shadows are all the prisoners know. To them, this play of light is reality. But one prisoner escapes and ascends to the surface, blinded at first by the sun. As his eyes adjust, he sees the real world: objects, light, and the source of what Plato perceived as the truth of all things. The perfect form of ideas. When he decides to return and free the others, they mock him, and if given the chance, would kill him for disturbing their illusion. The sure thing is that he will be met with negative and sometimes dangerous reactions from his fellow prisoners.
By Sergios Saropoulos8 months ago in Fiction
After The Sunset The Stars As My Witness. Content Warning.
Danae was often blind, deaf, and mute when it came to the reckless decisions that spewed out of Perseus’ often idle mind. Her son was all she had and she wanted him to be free and happy without her restricting him and maybe just maybe the empty feeling he always felt would go away. Even if she tried to guide him it was of no use, he was as stubborn as the donkey in Polydectes' courtyard that had refused to work for the past month despite the merciless whips it got. she thought of him more like the sun, you don't command it to rise or set or disappear it does as it pleases, majestically. This time would be different, this decision would be more than just reckless and she was going to try to stop her sun, she didn’t want her sun to set forever leaving her to the darkness to feast on her. However, she would not hear of these antics from the horse's mouth but instead from the one that fed the horse with the idea.
By Ropafadzo Thokozani Zinyuke (Fadzo) 8 months ago in Fiction
Manual of Love 2 (2007)
Scene 1: A Love Born from Tragedy – A Paraplegic and His Nurse The film starts with a sad but kind of sweet story. We see a guy’s life change completely when he gets an accident and becomes a paraplegic. While he’s adjusting to his new normal, he feels hopelessly lonely.
By Shoaib Rehman8 months ago in Fiction
