JStor is a digital library of academic journals, books and primary sources. To gain access students must create an account. This database is particularly useful for senior students wanting to access academic journals for authoritative content.
Klara and the Sun
by
This is the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behaviour of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change for ever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans.
Things We Didn't See Coming
by
A dazzling debut collection: nine connected stories set in a not-too-distant dystopian future in a landscape at once utterly fantastic and strangely familiar. Richly imagined, dark, and darkly comic, these stories follow the narrator over three decades as he tries to survive in a world that is becoming more savage as cataclysmic events unfold one after another. In the first story-set on the eve of the millennium, when the world as we know it is still recognizable-we meet the then nine-year-old narrator fleeing the city with his parents, just ahead of a Y2K breakdown of the grid, signaling the world's transformation and decline. The remaining stories capture the strange- sometimes horrific, sometimes unexpectedly funny-circumstances he encounters in the no-longerso- simple act of survival: trying to protect squatters against floods in a place where the rains never stop; harassed (and possibly infected) by a man sick with plague; functioning as a salaried embezzler of the state; escorting the gravely ill on adventure trips. Yet, in each story, we see that despite the violence and brutality of his days, the narrator retains a hold on his essential humanity. Things We Didn't See Coming is haunting, restrained, beautifully crafted-a stunning debut.