New Literary Fiction

"Euphemia's New Entertainment" by H. G. Wells is a short essay. H. G. Wells once different, humorous social satire and ironic. Euphemia has great ideas of putting people at their ease, a thousand little devices for thawing the very stiffest among them with a home-like glow. Far be it from me to sing her praises, but I must admit that at times she is extremely successful in this-at times almost too successful.

To Chinese American teenager Chuntao, New Lake is a beautiful haven where she can hunt for treasures once swallowed up by a big flood. But when she’s caught scavenging by her biology teacher, a woman whose own past has been swept away, Chuntao is faced with an imponderable question: Which world was better - the ideal one she never knew or the destroyed one that now belongs to her?

What a coincidence. The mummies wake up once a millennium, and who should stumble into the pyramid but our hero? This is a fun little story about a British ne'er-do-well who has found possible wealth and prosperity by becoming engaged to the rather plain - and plain is a nice word for it - daughter of a new English nobleman. But wait. He wanders into the pyramid when the mummies have their 24 hours of life once a millennium, and he falls madly in love with the Pharaoh's daughter, who is some 6,000 years old.

"Life in Questions and Exclamations" is a short story by the Russian writer and playwright Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904). Written and first published in 1882 in the journal Alarm Clock under the pseudonym Antosha Chekhonte, the short story "Life in Questions and Exclamations" is written in an unusual form of a collection of key phrases—memoirs for each stage of a man's life—childhood, adolescence, youth, the period "between 20 and 30 years", "between 30-50 years", and old age.