Bread and Roses Anthology – part one

The Reader is a charity which usually brings people together to listen to stories, extracts and poems in free, weekly Shared Reading groups that take place in community spaces, prisons, hospitals, libraries and on high streets across the UK.

While in lockdown, many aspects of our usual way of life may have been suspended but literature’s ability to offer us comfort, escapism and fellow feeling remains ‘as true as it ever was’[1]. Through the national emergency, The Reader’s aim as an organisation continues to be to help humans survive and live well.

To this end we are providing two services – literature to nourish the spirit of all and, from our national HQ at Calderstones Mansion in Liverpool, food to keep the body alive for people locally in most need. In the words of the early female unionists of the US, who recognised that life was not only about basic breadline necessities but also about the ineffable beauty of the world, ‘give us bread, but give us roses’.

We hope you can find within the pages of this anthology sustenance for the spirit and aid in glimpsing the roses.

Download the anthology here.