Harrison Bergeron French Translation from Avice Robitaille. Hindi Translation by Ashwin.Urdu Translation by RealMSRussian translation THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else.
The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen Most terribly cold it was; it snowed, and was nearly quite dark, and evening-- the last evening of the year. In this cold and darkness there went along the street a poor little girl, bareheaded, and with naked feet. When she left home she had slippers on, it is true; but what was the good of that? They were very large slippers, which her mother had hitherto worn; so large were they; and the poor little thing lost them as she scuffled away across the street, because of two carriages that rolled by dreadfully fast. One slipper was nowhere to be found; the other had been laid hold of by an urchin, and off he ran with it; he thought it would do capitally for a cradle when he some day or other should have children himself. She crept along trembling with cold and hunger--a very picture of sorrow, the poor little thing! The flakes of snow covered her long fair hair, which fell in beautiful curls around her neck; but of that, of course, she never once now thought. "Someone is just dead!"
I Am a Zombie Filled With Love - by Isaac Marion By Isaac Marion I am a zombie, and it's not so bad. I'm learning to live with it. Before I became a zombie, I think I was a businessman or young professional of some kind. We like to joke and speculate about our remaining outfits, since these final fashion choices are usually the only indication of who we were before we became no-one. You were a plumber. It usually doesn't. No one I know has any specific memories. There are a few hundred of us living in a wide plain of dust outside some large city. But it makes me sad that we've forgotten our names. Today a group of us are going into town to find some food. The city where the people live is not that far. I guess the world has mostly ended, because the cities we wander through are decaying as fast as we are. In a cluster of broken down apartment buildings we find some people, and we eat them. Eating is not a pleasant business. But of course I don't leave enough. I don't know why we have to eat people. I like her. I can read her name. End
The Ransom Of Red Chief by O Henry IT LOOKED like a good thing: but wait till I tell you. We were down South, in Alabama -- Bill Driscoll and myself -- when this kidnapping idea struck us. It was, as Bill afterward expressed it, "during a moment of temporary mental apparition"; but we didn't find that out till later. There was a town down there, as flat as a flannel-cake, and called Summit, of course. Bill and me had a joint capital of about six hundred dollars, and we needed just two thousand dollars more to pull off a fraudulent town-lot scheme in Western Illinois with. We selected for our victim the only child of a prominent citizen named Ebenezer Dorset. About two miles from Summit was a little mountain, covered with a dense cedar brake. "Hey, little boy!" The boy catches Bill neatly in the eye with a piece of brick. "That will cost the old man an extra five hundred dollars," says Bill, climbing over the wheel. Bill was pasting court-plaster over the scratches and bruises on his features. "Ha! "I like this fine. "Me?"
THE MACHINE STOPS ... E.M. Forster Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk-that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh-a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. An electric bell rang. The woman touched a switch and the music was silent. "I suppose I must see who it is", she thought, and set her chair in motion. "Who is it?" But when she listened into the receiver, her white face wrinkled into smiles, and she said: "Very well. She touched the isolation knob, so that no one else could speak to her. "Be quick!" "Kuno, how slow you are." He smiled gravely. "I really believe you enjoy dawdling." "Well?"
Haruki Murakami: The Second Bakery Attack Did you ever try to share something that impresses you very much with someone who impresses you very much, only to receive an impressive lack of appreciation? It's like taking landscape pictures from your vacation, and then showing them around. Just don't bother. This happened to me with Haruki Murakami. I guess we must choose our cultural battles carefully. But if at least one person is searching for some electronic Murakami and is gratified by this page, my labor will not have been in vain. The Second Bakery Attack, by Haruki Murakami I'm still not sure I made the right choice when I told my wife about the bakery attack. If you look at it this way, it just so happens that I told my wife about the bakery attack. What reminded me of the bakery attack was an unbearable hunger. Our refrigerator contained not a single item that could be technically categorized as food. I had a job in a law firm at the time, and she was doing secretarial work at a design school. She rejected that suggestion.
The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant The Necklace She was one of those pretty and charming girls born, as though fate had blundered over her, into a family of artisans. She had no marriage portion, no expectations, no means of getting known, understood, loved, and wedded by a man of wealth and distinction; and she let herself be married off to a little clerk in the Ministry of Education. Her tastes were simple because she had never been able to afford any other, but she was as unhappy as though she had married beneath her; for women have no caste or class, their beauty, grace, and charm serving them for birth or family, their natural delicacy, their instinctive elegance, their nimbleness of wit, are their only mark of rank, and put the slum girl on a level with the highest lady in the land. She suffered endlessly, feeling herself born for every delicacy and luxury. She had no clothes, no jewels, nothing. One evening her husband came home with an exultant air, holding a large envelope in his hand. "Nothing. "That's true.