0 Comments
0 Shares
30 Views
0 Reviews
Search
Discover new people, create new connections and make new friends
-
Please log in to like, share and comment!
-
Dr. Edmund Ashworth held the brass magnifying lens to the gas lamp and stared at the final calculation scrawled across three pages of his notebook. The ink was smudged from his trembling hand, but theOutside the rotunda of the New Carthage Observatory, the coal smoke of the industrial city had turned the evening sky the colour of bruised iron. Through the great brass telescope, Edmund could see the patch of night sky between the constellation Lyra and the swan—where, over the past forty-three years, he had recorded the gradual dimming of approximately three hundred and seventeen stars. His...0 Comments 0 Shares 14 Views 0 Reviews
-
I keep a ledger. Not a financial ledger—I stopped caring about money when I was thirty. This is a different kind of ledger. It's a book, three inches thick, bound in black leather, with pages divided into columns. On the left: names. On the right: numbers.Tony Valentine's name is on page 47. The numbers next to it tell the story of a man I watched burn, and the story of what I did to help him burn. I'm not going to pretend I held the match. I didn't. But I didn't put out the fire either. I stood to the side, took notes, and calculated the value of the ash. I met Tony in February 1954. I was running the Marquis Theatre on West 46th Street—we had...0 Comments 0 Shares 2 Views 0 Reviews
-
I keep a ledger. Not a financial ledger—I stopped caring about money when I was thirty. This is a different kind of ledger. It's a book, three inches thick, bound in black leather, with pages divided into columns. On the left: names. On the right: numbers.Tony Valentine's name is on page 47. The numbers next to it tell the story of a man I watched burn, and the story of what I did to help him burn. I'm not going to pretend I held the match. I didn't. But I didn't put out the fire either. I stood to the side, took notes, and calculated the value of the ash. I met Tony in February 1954. I was running the Marquis Theatre on West 46th Street—we had...0 Comments 0 Shares 5 Views 0 Reviews
-
I keep a ledger. Not a financial ledger—I stopped caring about money when I was thirty. This is a different kind of ledger. It's a book, three inches thick, bound in black leather, with pages divided into columns. On the left: names. On the right: numbers.Tony Valentine's name is on page 47. The numbers next to it tell the story of a man I watched burn, and the story of what I did to help him burn. I'm not going to pretend I held the match. I didn't. But I didn't put out the fire either. I stood to the side, took notes, and calculated the value of the ash. I met Tony in February 1954. I was running the Marquis Theatre on West 46th Street—we had...0 Comments 0 Shares 5 Views 0 Reviews
-
Six Pages from the WarThe sea at Long Island did not roar. It murmured, the way a woman murmurs to a child she is trying to soothe but does not fully believe can be soothed. Tommy Mercer stood at the edge of the water and listened to that murmur and tried to convince himself it was the same sound he had heard in France. It was not. The cabin was small. It had been a fisherman's shack once, before the developers...0 Comments 0 Shares 7 Views 0 Reviews
-
Six Pages from the WarThe sea at Long Island did not roar. It murmured, the way a woman murmurs to a child she is trying to soothe but does not fully believe can be soothed. Tommy Mercer stood at the edge of the water and listened to that murmur and tried to convince himself it was the same sound he had heard in France. It was not. The cabin was small. It had been a fisherman's shack once, before the developers...0 Comments 0 Shares 27 Views 0 Reviews
-
The Archive of Empty Pages
The first thing Eleanor noticed was the smell. Not the sterile ozone of the Ministry corridors, not the recycled air of her cubicle block—this was something older, deeper. It was the smell of paper that had survived centuries of trying to be erased.
She had found the books in Sub-level 7, behind a wall that was supposed to be solid concrete. The wall was not solid. There was a gap, no wider than her arm, and behind it: shelves. Rows of wooden shelves, black with age, stacked with volumes whose spines bore titles she had never seen and would never be allowed to mention.
The Ministry called this sector "Unapproved Material, Pending Calibration." Eleanor called it something else, something she would never write down even in her private notebook, because even she knew better than to commit treason to paper.
She called it a library.
Eleanor Voss was thirty-four, a Level Three Archivist at the Ministry of Unified Truth, and for
The Archive of Empty Pages
The first thing Eleanor noticed was the smell. Not the sterile ozone of the Ministry corridors, not the recycled air of her cubicle block—this was something older, deeper. It was the smell of paper that had survived centuries of trying to be erased.
She had found the books in Sub-level 7, behind a wall that was supposed to be solid concrete. The wall was not solid. There was a gap, no wider than her arm, and behind it: shelves. Rows of wooden shelves, black with age, stacked with volumes whose spines bore titles she had never seen and would never be allowed to mention.
The Ministry called this sector "Unapproved Material, Pending Calibration." Eleanor called it something else, something she would never write down even in her private notebook, because even she knew better than to commit treason to paper.
She called it a library.
Eleanor Voss was thirty-four, a Level Three Archivist at the Ministry of Unified Truth, and for
The Archive of Empty PagesThe Archive of Empty Pages The first thing Eleanor noticed was the smell. Not the sterile ozone of the Ministry corridors, not the recycled air of her cubicle block—this was something older, deeper. It was the smell of paper that had survived centuries of trying to be erased. She had found the books in Sub-level 7, behind a wall that was supposed to be solid concrete. The wall was not solid....0 Comments 0 Shares 8 Views 0 Reviews -
The Archive of Whispering PagesThe fog that evening was thicker than usual, as though London itself were holding its breath. Arthur Wentworth stood in the doorway of his bookshop on Gordon Square, watching the gas lamps flicker through the yellow murk. Thirty years he had kept this shop. Thirty years of dust and silence and the slow decay of paper. He knew every crack in the floorboards, every stain on the ceiling, every...0 Comments 0 Shares 31 Views 0 Reviews
-
The Blackwood PagesThe Blackwood PagesI found the book in a cabinet of polished mahogany, behind a row of leather-bound volumes that smelled of lavender and old paper. The cabinet stood in the library of my family's town house in Grosvenor Square, a room I had not entered in three years, not since my father's death and the subsequent dispersal of his collection to dealers in London and Paris who paid good prices...0 Comments 0 Shares 3 Views 0 Reviews
-
The Blank PagesThe encrypted hard drive smelled like David's apartment—old books and lavender candle wax and the faint metallic tang of the radiator that never worked properly in winter. I found it taped under his desk, where he'd told me once, in that careful way he had of saying important things without saying them, that I should "check behind the radiator if I ever needed to know what he'd been really...0 Comments 0 Shares 7 Views 0 Reviews
-
The book was eight hundred and forty-seven pages long, and when I finished it on a cold November night in 2014, I understood for the first time exactly what I had built and exactly what it had cost. NMy name is Robert Thorne, though nobody has called me that in years. Everyone calls me Bobby, which sounds softer than it is, like a name you might give a dog. I was thirty-seven when I arrived in Blackwater Creek, West Virginia, with two suitcases, a stack of books, and a laptop. The town was a ghost. Population zero since 1987. The general store was rotting, the schoolhouse had no roof, and...0 Comments 0 Shares 4 Views 0 Reviews
More Results
Arabic
French
Spanish
Portuguese
Deutsch
Turkish
Dutch
Italiano
Russian
Romaian
Portuguese (Brazil)
Greek