The underground canon — the samizdat — was also small, chosen nearly at random with questionable literary taste and eclectic political beliefs: retyped manuscripts of recently written unpublishable books; facsimile copies of rediscovered books from an earlier, freer era; and printed volumes smuggled into the country by proselytizers of various kinds.
Let us know what you think of today's random bit of literary and art history in the comments.
The literary miscellany consists of random jottings by the yangban on four broad topics: history, biography, autobiography, and poetic criticism.
Or, as the New York Times more dramatically stated, "A chain-letter-cum-literary exercise called '25 Random Things About Me' is threatening to consume what little remaining free time and privacy we have".
First, they showed 1,000 people a list of names that included authors identified as literary, authors identified as genre, and random names of non-authors.
When the nation's largest publisher, Random House, took up new temporary quarters in Manhattan this summer, it suddenly became clear how random is its system for preserving a rich literary legacy that embraces authors from William Faulkner to Toni Morrison.
Latest work: Ramayana: A Retelling (Faber) Here are 10 random, patronising considerations for the judges of British literary prizes: Taste is subjective and is established by personal factors such as your upbringing.
"Sonny is very unknowable, and that is one of the reasons he is so seductive," said Joni Evans, a literary agent and former president of Little Random.
Sometimes the name seems random but some vessels are named after famous figures (real, literary or mythical), places, song titles or for family members.
This is not so much a problem of literary style – a few minutes' riffling though his works at random will confirm that Spenser has style in spades – as one of literary form.
