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  Selections from Battle-Pieces...

  Herman Melville

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  Published in 1866, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War is a collection of poems about the Civil War by Herman Melville. Many of the poems are inspired by second- and third-hand accounts from print news sources (especially the Rebellion Record) and from family and friends. A handful of trips Melville took before, during, and after the war provide additional angles of vision into the battles, the personalities, and the moods of war. In an opening note, Melville describes his project not so much as a systematic chronicle (though many of the individual poems refer to specific events) but as a kind of memory piece of national experience. The "aspects" to which he refers in the title are as diverse as "the moods of involuntary meditation—moods variable, and at times widely at variance." Much of the verse is stylistically conventional (more so than modern readers perhaps expect from the author of Moby-Dick), but the shifting subjectivities and unresolved traumas that unfold in the collection merit repeated contemplation. Melville's Battle-Pieces do not offer a neatly versified narrative of the Civil War but rather kaleidescopic glimpses of shifting emotions and ambivalent reflections of post-war America

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  Pictures from Italy (Unabridged)

  Charles Dickens

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  Pictures from Italy is a travelogue by Charles Dickens, written in 1846. The book reveals the concerns of its author as he presents, according to Kate Flint, the country "like a chaotic magic-lantern show, fascinated both by the spectacle it offers, and by himself as spectator".

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  The Machine Stops

  E.M. Forster

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  The Machine Stops" is a science fiction short story by E. M. Forster.  The story describes a world in which most of the human population has lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual now lives in isolation below ground in a standard 'cell', with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine

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  On an Amateur Beat (Unabridged)

  Charles Dickens

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  Charles Dickens was a writer and social critic who created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the twentieth century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity.ON AN AMATEUR BEAT: IT is one of my fancies, that even my idlest walk must always have its appointed destination. I set myself a task before I leave my lodging in Covent-garden on a street expedition, and should no more think of altering my route by the way, or turning back and leaving a part of it unachieved, than I should think of fraudulently violating an agreement entered into with somebody else.

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  Each One His Part (Unabridged)

  Booker T. Washington

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  Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856 - November 14, 1915) was an American educator, author, orator, and adviser to several presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African American community and of the contemporary black elite. Washington was from the last generation of black American leaders born into slavery and became the leading voice of the former slaves and their descendants. They were newly oppressed in the South by disenfranchisement and the Jim Crow discriminatory laws enacted in the post-Reconstruction Southern states in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.EACH ONE HIS PART: I desire to call your attention for a few minutes to-night to the fact that one thing is dependent for success upon another, one individual is dependent for success upon another, one family in a community upon other families for their mutual prosperity, one part of a State upon the other parts for the successful government of the State. The same thing is true in nature. One thing cannot exist unless another exists; cannot succeed without the success of something else. The very forces of nature are dependent upon other forces for their existence. Without vegetable life we could not have animal life; without mineral life we could not have vegetable life. So, throughout all kinds of life, as throughout the life of nature, everything is dependent upon something else for its success.

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  Fat and Thin

  Anton Checkhov

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  "Fat and Thin" is a satirical short story by Anton Chekhov, first published in the No. 40, 1 October 1883 issue of Oskolki magazine, signed A. Chekhonte (А. Чехонте). The plot of the short story "Fat and Thin" in its original version was based on an anecdote, and the conflict between the characters arose accidentally, due to the involuntary oversight of the "Thin". At a railway station the fat one, Mischa, accidentally meets the thin one, Porfiri. The thin man travels accompanied by his wife and son. The two old school friends greet each other in an exuberant and informal manner. A conversation follows, and it is about careers of both of them as government officials.

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