The Bakery Attack – Haruki Murakami - https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/bakery-attack/

Cry Snooker By ANDREW FETLER - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/51570/pg51570-images.html

 

In every language and at all periods, loose poems or fragments of poems are found that cannot be formally classified among the collected works of any known author, or bound up with other anonymous material forming an historical unit for which a legendary author has been invented; or yet, because of their character and number, be given each the distinction of separate publication. Popular ballads, unless forming part of a single cycle, epigrams, epitaphs, squibs, stray lyrics and even longer poems that have irretrievably lost author and date, may be fittingly united in a volume of non-classifiable verse; and this is always a legitimate use of the anthology. The anthology of the days before cheap books were printed was justified as a secure portfolio for short poems that might otherwise have been lost: short poems in confederacy being as safe from loss as a drama or epic equalling their combined length. When at the beginning of the first century before Christ Meleager compiled his Crown of epigrammatic 12verse as a gift for one Diocles, ‘weaving in the lilies of Anyte, the scarlet gopher of Antipater, the narcissus of Melanippides, the aromatic rush of Perseus, the young vine-branch of Simonides,’ and so on, he was doing a service both to Diocles and to the poems, which were fugitive pieces not obtainable at every public library or copying-school. Further, this compilation was made without prejudice to the longer poems by the authors represented in the anthology, or by other authors, which Diocles might obtain in manuscripts of formal length. Meleager added epigrams of his own to the Crown, but none written by any contemporary except those of his famous neighbour Antipater, and these probably for friendship’s sake only; the poems of other contemporaries were left to their own fate. The Crown was an anthology in the sense that A. H. Bullen’s Lyrics from the Elizabethan Song Books is an anthology: it was a collection of flowers, but from remote or not readily accessible gardens. But Meleager was a poet exercising an independent personal taste, Bullen a literary connoisseur. Although Diocles was informed at the end of the ‘proem’ that the garland was not merely a personal gift to him but a common gift to all lovers of poetry, this was rather a rhetorical flourish than an acknowledgment of responsibility to a poetry-consuming public, such as Bullen must have felt. Diocles circulated the manuscript: it was copied and much admired.

 

A Pamphlet
AGAINST ANTHOLOGIES

by
LAURA RIDING
AND ROBERT GRAVES - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/79781/pg79781-images.html

Babylon Revisited – F. Scott Fitzgerald - https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/babylon-revisited/

The Voiceless Sentinels by Roger Dee - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/79780/pg79780-images.html

 

There’s a Man in the Habit of Hitting Me on the Head with an Umbrella – Fernando Sorrentino - https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/hitting-me-with-umbrella/

The Historical Evolution of The Ukrainian Problem By Prof. MICHAELO HRUSHEVSKY - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/79773/pg79773-images.html

 The history of the Ukrainian question, as it offers itself to us to-day, dates from the middle of the seventeenth century, that is, the time of the great Ukrainian Revolution of 1648, which had 

6given a glaring publicity to the problem, and caused at the same time the partition of the Ukraine between the Muscovite Empire and the Kingdom of Poland. From that day began the decadence of National Ukrainian life. Yet at the same time one could already observe in the people new aspirations towards the re-establishment of their independence. These aspirations tended to put aside all obstacles which opposed the intellectual, social and political development of the country. They can be traced in the movement now taking place in the Ukrainian provinces of both the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. The causes which have determined the more recent phases of this movement have their origin in the past centuries. They are a result not only of the political life of the people, but also of the geographical peculiarities of the territory inhabited by this people, of its situation, its physical nature, and of the conditions in which the colonization of the soil was accomplished.

The country inhabited by the Ukrainians is very vast, very fertile, and well watered. Already, in the days of ancient Greece it was one of its granaries, and the Greeks drew therefrom their larger supply. Later, at the beginning of the modern period, these lands provisioned to a large extent Central and Northern Europe in wheat, cattle, and wood. The country possesses immense natural riches—such as iron, coal, salt and other minerals. It furnishes at the present to Eastern Europe most of its cereals, meat, sugar, salt, iron, mercury, etc.

From the very early times the Ukraine has for various reasons awakened the thirst for conquest in its neighbours. Its situation at the centre of the vast plains that join Central Europe to Central Asia on the broad way which, so far as our memory can stretch, various peoples have always followed, and which served for the exchange of the products of civilization—for the coast of the Black Sea offers an especially favourable road for relations 7between west, east, and south—all this made of the Ukraine a land of dreams for each of the neighbouring States, as soon as they thought of any political expansion. This longing was facilitated by the fact that the natural frontiers of the country offer almost nowhere any obstacle of importance to invasion.