≡ Category: Audio Books, Books | ≅ 1 Comment
The Alchemist has sold more than 65 million copies and been translated into 56 languages. A huge bestseller, in short. Here it is unabridged and free. I am not sure how long this offer will last. So I would grab it sooner than later — and while you’re at it, don’t forget to look through [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Darwinmania (as The New York Times dubbed it) is about to begin. During the next year, we will celebrate Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the Origin of Species (download zip audio here) and the discovery of natural selection. It’s pretty much a given that the minutiae of Darwin’s life will get thoroughly [...]
≡ Category: Books, Google, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Leave a Comment
Salman Rushdie’s latest book, The Enchantress of Florence: A Novel, has hit the streets. And it comes just three years after his last one, Shalimar the Clown, which makes him a good deal more prolific than many of his contemporaries. (A piece in The Guardian — The Great American Pause — notes that many celebrated [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
The Harry Potter prequel that JK Rowling wrote for charity is now available online. To read it, click here, then click “Read our authors’ stories,” and then click JK Rowling.
Related:
J.K. Rowling Tells Harvard Graduates What They Need to Know
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≡ Category: Books, YouTube | ≅ Leave a Comment
Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal took a look at an emerging trend in the publishing world — using viral videos to promote new books. The strategy, which hasn’t yet generated much in the way of sales, is being used to market books by established authors (take Jodi Picoult’s 19 Minutes for example) and [...]
≡ Category: Art, Books, Sci Fi | ≅ Leave a Comment
Quick fyi for BoingBoing readers …. Cory Doctorow has just released comic adaptations of his award-winning science fiction stories — Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now. You can download them here for free, or buy the collection on Amazon.
Related Content:
Download free copy of Shake Girl
17 Free and Downloadable Graphic Novels
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≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
This is a clever web site created by the folks at the New Zealand Book Council. The site creates a replica of a PC desktop environment, and, within the folders, you’ll find texts that can be read on the sly.
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≡ Category: Books, Stanford | ≅ Leave a Comment
Here at Stanford, a couple of our teachers (Tom Kealey and Adam Johnson) took a novel approach to running a writing class. They wanted to see what happens when 14 students collectively write, edit and illustrate a graphic novel. (A graphic novel is a type of comic book that features a lengthy and complex storyline.) [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
As I write, the most emailed article on The New York Times offers a few reflections on Peter Boxall’s book, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. The Times piece makes a couple of logical points: First, there’s no time to waste if you hope to read every book on the list. Reading a [...]
≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
Segueing from our last post, I wanted to feature a reading given by Tobias Wolff, a master of the short story, who also happens to teach creative writing at Stanford.
In March, he released a new book, Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories. And below we have posted a clip of him reading from a [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
The wisdom of crowds concept works for writing software. (Think open source.) But does it work for writing novels? That’s what Penguin and De Monfort University (in the UK) wanted to figure out when they launched an experiment in February 2007 called “A Million Little Penguins.” Over the course of five weeks, roughly 1500 writers [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Last week, Junot Diaz landed the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with his debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The book, which Diaz took 11 years to write, also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for best novel of 2007. Below, we have Diaz speaking last year about his prize winning book [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ 1 Comment
Penguin is presenting six stories, by six authors, over six weeks, in a series called We Tell Stories. And they’re using the web to tell these stories in original ways. One story, The 21 Steps, gets told over Google Maps — an approach that scores points for creativity, but also tires a little quickly. You [...]
≡ Category: Books, Business, Foreign Language, Media, Technology | ≅ Leave a Comment
The New York Times has a great article on a professor of management science who has founded an almost completely automated publishing company. The 200,000 books he’s published sound, well, terrible, and terribly overpriced: “Among the books published under his name are ‘The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea’ ($24.95 and 168 pages long); ‘Stickler [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Get the “ultimate reading list,” according to the Telegraph. The booklist (access here) ranges from “classics and sci-fi to poetry, biographies and books that changed the world.” And while you’re at it, check out this list of life-changing books created by our very own readers.
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≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
As a New Yorker living rather permanently in sunny California, I feel somewhat obliged to mention this: New York Magazine has pulled together a list of “26 works of lapidary New Yorkitude” — that is, highly literary books that obsess over the great city. On the list, you’ll find works by Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, [...]
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We take you back to the mid 1950s, to an interview with Vladimir Nabokov and Lionel Trilling that was conducted soon after the publication of Lolita (1955). Lolita’s basic plot is well known — middle-aged Humbert Humbert develops a passionate obsession for twelve-year old Dolores Haze and takes her on the road. For some critics, [...]
≡ Category: Books, Web/Tech | ≅ Leave a Comment
At The Berkman Center for Internet and Society (at Harvard Law School), Clay Shirky gave a talk on his highly touted new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. You can catch his talk here: video for computer or portable device - high res video - mp3 audio. And sample some of [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
When Amazon’s Kindle hit the streets last November, the critics gave the newfangled ebook reader mixed reviews. The customers, however, have been saying something a little bit different. Sales have been brisk, a bit too brisk actually. Waiting up to six weeks to get the Kindle, customers have been getting huffy, and last week Amazon’s [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 57 weeks. If you haven’t read it yet, then you may want to spend some time with Gilbert’s talk at Google. While her talk and reading didn’t completely strike a chord with me, it may well with you. So here [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
HarperCollins has rolled out another free book — the New York Times bestseller American Gods by Neil Gaiman. You can read it for free here (or buy it here). For more free books by HarperCollins, see our post from last week. And, as always, don’t forget to see our collection of free audiobooks.
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≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
As discussed in this NY Times article, HarperCollins has made a few of its books available online for free. You can read them from start to finish in digital format. But you can’t download them, and they’ll only be available for a few more weeks. (Presumably new books will be made available in the future.) [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ 1 Comment
Coming off of the runaway success of Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan has just published a logical sequel — In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. His new book tells us what to eat, what not to eat, and how to stay healthy. Generally speaking, his advice can be boiled down to a few words: “Eat [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ 1 Comment
A quick fyi: From this page, you can download or view 17 graphic novels. This genre, which meshes comic book artwork with sophisticated literary plots, has undergone a major resurgence lately. So we’re not shocked (but we are pleased) to find these kinds of collections taking shape.
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≡ Category: Books | ≅ 1 Comment
Quick fyi: The book critics of The New York Times have selected their favorite books of 2007. These are the books that they mention to friends, or recommend that you take on vacation. You’ll find here 30 good reads in all.
Now how about your favorite book of ‘07? Share them with other Open Culture readers [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ 1 Comment
Here are a few facts to know about the adventurous Patrick Hunt. He’s a Stanford archaeologist who has spent more than a decade trying to unravel the mystery of how Hannibal, the great ancient military leader, crossed the Alps in 218 BCE with 25,000 men and 37 elephants. (Listen on iTunes to the course he [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
The routine is always the same here in the Bay Area. Wake up, get in the car, listen to Forum on KQED. Today, the host Michael Krasny invited listeners to call in and pick the best books of the year, or those they plan to give as gifts this holiday season. To get some good [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Talk has recently focused on the passing of Norman Mailer, a novelist remembered for many things. As The New York Times put it, he was “a prodigious drinker and drug taker, a womanizer, a devoted family man, a would-be politician who ran for mayor of New York, a hipster existentialist, an antiwar protester, an opponent [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ 1 Comment
After recently publishing its list of 100 Notable Books of 2007, The New York Times has narrowed things down and selected The 10 Best Books of 2007 - five fiction, and five nonfiction. Have a look.
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≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Gift buying season is now officially upon us. If books are part of your gift buying plan, then have a look at this list just published by The New York Times. The 100 books listed here include fiction, poetry and nonfiction. Among others, you’ll find Philip Roth’s latest book, Exit Ghost, and I mention it [...]
