Excerpt: The Champion Of His Country. When young Nevil Beauchamp was throwing off his midshipman?s jacket for a holiday in the garb of peace, we had across Channel a host of dreadful military officers flashing swords at us for some critical observations of ours upon their sovereign, threatening Africa?s fires and savagery....

Excerpt: The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells.

Excerpt: The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane.

Excerpt: What Is Coming? A Forecast of Things after the War by H. G. Wells.

Next to de Alexis de Tocquville's almost contemporary Democracy in America, Frances Trollope's work may be the most famous (or at least notorious) dissection of manners and morals of the United States. The work was a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic, and particularly in America, where Trollope was reviled as representing the worst of old world prejudices the new republic (though the criticism did nothing to hurt sales). Accompanied by a son and two daughters, Trollope lived in the United States from 1827 to 1831, spending most of her time in Cincinnati, where she had hoped, when joined by her husband, to open a large department store, which was also to be a place of entertainment and culture. She was, unfortunately, almost entirely ignorant of business practices, and habitually short of money, which her husband was in no position to make up. After leaving Cincinnati she traveled briefly in the eastern states, before returning to England. There is something of a happy ending; Domestic Manners was her first book, and such a success that she turned to writing, producing in her lifetime over a hundred books, which, though they ne...

Fiction, Travel

Excerpt: War and Peace: Book Thirteen by Leo Tolstoy.

Set in a future in which humanity’s dream of total equality is fully realized and poverty in terms of material wealth has been eliminated, humanity has straight-jacketed itself into the only social system which could make this possible. Class differentiation is entirely horizontal rather than vertical and no matter what one’s chosen field, all advancement is based solely on seniority rather than ability. What is an intelligent and ambitious man to do when enslaved by a culture that forbids him from utilizing his God-given talents? If he’s a military officer in time of war, he might just decide to switch sides. If said officer is a true believer in the principles that enslave him and every bit as loyal as he is ambitious, that’s tantamount to breaking a universal law of physics, but Colonel Sebastian MacMaine has what it takes to meet the challenge. (Summary by Lee)...

Science fiction

Cupertino Story is a vivid and mesmerizing tale of troubled adolescents and misfits - a harrowing and perceptive fiction debut from a promising new literary voice. This raw and ominous portrait of a lost generation traces the lives of teenagers and their experiments with vices of all kinds, struggles with family and one another, as they succumb to passivity, self destructive and often heartless nihilism. Stevo lives in a world of casual privilege, acute moral entropy and reckless abandon. The weight of his older brother’s mysterious disappearance begins to permeate through his everyday life. After writing a disturbing school essay he’s put into therapy and given anti depressants. He’s continuously entranced by a mysterious new girl at school named Holly who may or may not be a high class call girl. His best friend Drake’s repressed homosexual bent becomes more evident with their drug induced adventures. The dizzying whirlwind of desperation takes Stevo through relentless parties in dot com villas, seedy bars, Santa Cruz bonfires, and also into the lesser known world of Silicon Valley after dark. Set in Szymanowski’s hometown,...

I swallow two Ritalins and see dark circles under my eyes in the reflection. Foam is forming and spilling from my mouth, splashing in the sink and getting on my jeans. The TV says the winds have pulled trees from the ground and flipped over cars, and roofs of houses have been torn off. They advise people to stay indoors if they can. There is too much danger outside in these harsh conditions, they say, and then a commercial comes on about ten dollar oil changes at Jiffy Lube. The branches of the tree outside the bathroom are swinging and whipping at the window and house so loud that my mom screams. In the reflection, my mom passes with a coffee mug in hand and a long coat on. She says this is the worst time to be remodeling and is complaining about the cold, about how the heater should work soon but the workers keep rescheduling because of the weather. Where is the remote? she yells. I can’t remember where I put the damn remote. The foam keeps collecting and spilling out of my mouth. I open my mouth wide and spit it all out so it splatters on the mirror and the sides of the sink and onto my stomach and in the foamy spit there are s...

The whole paradoxist distich should be as a geometric unitary parabola, hyperbola, ellipse at the borders between art, philosophy, rebus, and mathematics – which exist in complementariness. The School of Paradoxist Literature, which evolved around 1980s, continues through these bi-verses closed in a new lyric exact formula, but with an opening to essence. For this kind of procedural poems one can elaborate mathematical algorithms and implement them in a computer: but, it is preferable a machine with … soul!...

I M M O D E S T With the shame Shamelessness U N D E C I D E D Fighting Himself J A Z Z ( I ) Melodious Anarchy J A Z Z ( I I ) Anarchic Melody...

Fore/word and Back/word _________ 3 The making of the distich : _____ 3 Characteristics: ______________ 3 Historical considerations: _____ 5 Types of Paradoxist distiches ___ 8 1. Clichés paraphrased: ___ 8 2. Parodies: _____________ 8 3. Reversed formulae: ____ 8 4. Double negation _______ 8 5. Double affirmation, ____ 8 6. Turn around on false tracks: _________________ 8 7. Hyperboles (exaggerated): __________________ 8 8. With nuance changeable from the title: ________ 8 9. Epigrammatic: ________ 8 10. Pseudo-paradoxes: ___ 8 11. Tautologies: ________ 9 12. Redundant: _________ 9 13. Based on pleonasms: _ 9 14. or on anti-pleonasms: 9 15. Substitution of the attribute in collocations ___ 9 16. Substitution of the complement in collocations 9 17. Permutation of various parts of the whole: ___ 9 18. The negation of the clichés ______________ 10 19. Antonymization (substantively, adjectively, etc.) ________________ 10 20. Fable against the grain: _________________ 10 21. Change in grammatical category (preserving substitutions’ homonymy): ________________ 10 22. Epistolary or colloquia style: _________...