Jules is a young man barely a century old. He's lived long enough to see the cure for death and the end of scarcity, to learn ten languages and compose three symphonies...and to realize his boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World. Disney World! The greatest artistic achievement of the long-ago twentieth century. Now in the keeping of a network of "ad-hocs" who keep the classic attractions running as they always have, enhanced with only the smallest high-tech touches. Now, though, the "ad hocs" are under attack. A new group has taken over the Hall of the Presidents, and is replacing its venerable audioanimatronics with new, immersive direct-to-brain interfaces that give guests the illusion of being Washington, Lincoln, and all the others. For Jules, this is an attack on the artistic purity of Disney World itself. Worse: it appears this new group has had Jules killed. This upsets him. (It's only his fourth death and revival, after all.) Now it's war...

This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers. For readers of "Oryx and Crake," nothing will ever look the same again. The narrator of Atwood's riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He searches for supplies in a wasteland where insects proliferate and pigoons and wolvogs ravage the pleeblands, where ordinary people once lived, and the Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary. As he tries to piece together what has taken place, the narrative shifts to decades earlier. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Why is he left with nothing but his haunting memories? Alone except for the green-eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of monster, he explores the answers to these questions in the double journey he takes - into his own past, and back to Crake's high-tech bubble-dome, where the Paradice Project unfolded and the world came to grief. With breathtaking command of her shocking material, and with her customary sharp wit and dark humour, Atwood projects us into an outlandish yet wholly believable realm populated by characters who will continue to inhabit our dreams long after the last chapter.

I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Democratic Republic of Congo - back when it was still known as Zaire - teaching English at a high school in a small village that would come to change my life. At night, I would write by kerosene lantern about life in Kamponde: the weddings and funerals, the gossip and politics; the joys and frustrations of teaching; the attempted diamond bribes by some students, the marinating python dances and the freshly fermented calabashes of palm wine. I wrote about the unrelenting kindness shown a young woman so far from home who really had no idea where she belonged in the world. It was in this village that I found my voice, one that would lead me to become a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press. When my two-year Peace Corps tour came to an end, I had promised to return and write about them one day. I did. Twice. The first time was 15 years later and that story was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. But readers were not privy to the greater personal impact of that trip. When the village women learned my husband and I had failed for years to conceive, they prayed and chanted to their gods to bring us a child, as we danced beneath the stars, shuffling and sashaying around a bonfire to the beat of the bamboo xylophones. Six months later I was pregnant. I realized this as I was covering the downfall of the Congo's 32-year dictator, President Mobutu Sese Seko. Chris and I escaped the rebel forces approaching Kinshasa by crossing the Congo River in a dugout canoe. Now, more than 30 years after serving in that village, I am planning to return to Kamponde with my daughter to thank them, have her blessed and say a final farewell. I am writing a memoir about this connection to Kamponde, and this is the draft of Chapter One. If any dear readers would like to join my Kickstarter Campaign to raise money for the journey back to Kamponde, you can link here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1654874900/it-took-a-village-a-memoir

In Tokyo, where the System siphons thought, emotions & memories, a literature student meets a strange psychic girl and they embark on an escape from mindless agents, dream worlds and reality itself, in a soul-searching journey for love, for identity and what it means to be human. But all that remains is a peculiar coffee shop order. The novel examines the human condition, perception, socio-political systems, capitalism and consumer culture, incorporating paranoiac conspiracy theories, surreal cosmic visions, circular symbolism and shifting parallel worlds, with profound discussions of coffee, art, literature and music. [Dystopia, Magical Realism, Philosophy, Literary] #1 Sci-Fi, Spiritual; #Wattys2014 Award Winner; Featured on Wattpad, IndieReader, @DIGonUSA "Struck me to the very core of my being." "Very interesting concept of reality... Thought provoking.." "I have been turned to a whole new way of thinking because of you." "Like a seven course meal full of spice and illumination... One does not listen to a classical piece to get to its ending. No. It is the ride, the moment by moment...a genuine Masamune among stories." "It was both personable and philosophical. A rare breed of good story and thought provoking ideas... A virtual standing ovation would not be enough to encapsulate the absolute awe I have of you." "It's not a regular thing to find a piece of work that oozes sophistication and embodies literature and art." "The world Takatsu has created opens to the deeper awareness of another, the draw of another." - Mary L Tabor, Wattpad author, essayist, professor "Offers acute, almost painful observations of the minutiae of life, if life took place in a Murakami snow-globe." - IndieReader Insiders "Vapoury style that seems to hover off world at times...haunting and strange (which is good)...You're on to something different, striking." - B.W. Powe, York University English Professor, award-winning author, poet, philosopher http://EspressoLove.tk

We're trying something new. Well, trying two new things. We're starting to blog about Wattpad's journey into the world of microservices. And we're blogging on our own platform. We're proud of the really hard problems we have to solve every day and we'd love to show the solutions to the world. We also know that being candid and talking about our experiences (good and bad) in the public will benefit other engineering teams as well as ours. None of us is a blogger so it's difficult. But we're accustomed to overcoming difficult problems. The theme here will be our unique personal experiences along the way, ones you haven't heard elsewhere. Don't expect posts that debate monoliths vs. microservices or how to use Docker to do continuous deployment. Those are dead horses. We're frightened of dead horses so we don't want to go near them, let alone beat them. We'll be talking about our failures just as much as our successes. We're forging new paths in scaling a platform that allows millions of people to read and write. That means we have unique problems and we can't wait to talk about them. Our load balancers receive over 2 billion requests per day. Our traffic is constantly growing. We have a large monolithic PHP codebase. We decided about a year ago to start chipping away at that monolith to turn it into microservices. We have two microservices under our belts now so we'll recount what it took to create them and what the hard parts were and going forward we'll post current projects, as we're working on them. We just started working on perhaps our most important microservice, the Text Service. This service will be responsible for all storage and retrieval of text. Pretty key for a reading and writing platform. Oh yeah, we're not just creating microservices, we're writing them in Go and loving it so expect to hear all about that too.

Spanning 3 years, 23 countries, 45 cities, 31 flights, 15 bus rides, 5 ferry rides, and 9 train rides, this is the story of what happens when you learn you're never too old to run away.

By Frances Hodgson Burnett

Write the future with Margaret Atwood If you could write a story for a time capsule, one that wouldn’t be opened until the year 2114, what would you say? To celebrate the creation of Katie Paterson's artwork Future Library, we’re hosting the “Dear 2114” Future Library writing contest with Margaret Atwood. The Writing Contest Write a story based on one of the following prompts to enter the "Dear 2114" Future Library writing contest: *Dear 2114 - Write a story about the advice you would give the world in 2114? *This is 2114 - Write a story about what the world be like when the Future Library is opened in 2114? *Pandora's Room - Write what you imagine are in the stories of the Future Library that will be first read in 2114? Keep reading for full contest details and how to enter!

WINNER of Margaret Atwood's 'Dear 2114' #FutureLibrary Contest! I attempt to answer the prompt: Write a story about the advice you would give the world in 2114. Listen very closely, future people. Or not. Your choice. (Cover designed by Amber K Bryant. Cover image and chapter image have no known copyright restrictions).