≡ Category: Comedy, Literature, Uncategorized | ≅ 1 Comment
Every June 16 is Bloomsday, which commemorates Jame’s Joyce’s Ulysses (get free audio here). In Dublin and around the world, celebrations usually include a reading of Joyce’s classic. This year, in New York City, one high-profile event featured Stephen Colbert reading the part of Leopold Bloom, the character around which the sprawling novel turns. You [...]
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Here’s 1984, Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, The Great Gatsby and other classics boiled down to three lines, courtesy of McSweeny’s.
≡ Category: Audio Books, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
Here’s a quick one while I am away on some unexpected business…
Over at the Internet Archive, you can find George Orwell’s classic, 1984, available as a free audio book. As you’ll see, the recording is professionally done. You can download the full zip file here. Or alternatively you can get the individual mp3 files, or [...]
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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 [...]
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Apparently, this is “an authentic wax cylinder recording of Whitman reading from his late poem ‘America’ that appeared in 1888 …”
via The Daily Dish
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≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
A quick heads up: The first issue of The Straddler, a new quarterly online magazine, has just been launched. If the editors have their way, it will be the “anti-magazine of our day.” In the first issue, you’ll find:
an essay exploring the relationship between an Emily Dickinson poem, the New Testament’s Book of Matthew, [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
Can you bear it? If not, here’s a version by Christopher Walken.
(This video has not been added to our YouTube playlist.)
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This week, the Pulitzer Prize for poetry went to Robert Hass, a UC Berkeley professor and former U.S. poet laureate. To mark the occasion, we’re posting here Sierra Club Radio’s interview with Hass. The interview, recorded this past Saturday (mp3 - iTunes - web site), delves into Hass’ “thoughts on the intersection between language and [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
Put together by the American Book Review, this list (which comes in PDF format) serves up some of the great last lines from modern literature. Ranking number six on the list is a passage that I happened to read just yesterday: “Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” –Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also [...]
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Today, we have a guest feature by Don from Classic Poetry Aloud (iTunes - Feed - Web Site), a place where you can find a great lineup of poetry podcasts. We welcome other guest contributors. So, if you’re interested, just email us. Take it away (and thanks) Don…
The internet has given poetry new scope and [...]
≡ Category: Literature, MIT, Media, Weblogs | ≅ 2 Comments
For a graduate student in an English Ph.D. program, one of the big milestones on the road to the dissertation is the Oral Exam. In my case this involves five professors, a list of 60-80 books, and two hours in a (rhetorically) smoke-filled room. Since I’m working on contemporary literature and new media, one of [...]
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Open Source (iTunes Feed Web Site) is back. The radio show hosted by Christopher Lydon hit some financial snags last summer and went off-air. Now, thanks to the Watson Institute at Brown University, the program has found new life, and it’s already regaining some of its old momentum.
Right before the New Year, the [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
Back in June, we highlighted the release of James Joyce’s Ulysses in free audiobook format. Ulysses stands as Joyce’s most important work, and for some, it’s most the important work published in the English language during the entire 20th century. Despite Ulysses‘ enormous stature, many readers still turn to Dubliners, a collection of 15 short [...]
≡ Category: Literature, Media | ≅ 2 Comments
WNYC’s latest On The Media (iTunes - Feed - Site) covers the crisis of traditional book publishing in a new media age. While Amazon rolls out the Kindle and more and more content comes out in pure digital form, we’re still publishing more books than ever before. One interesting note from the program is that [...]
≡ Category: Literature, Podcast Articles and Resources | ≅ Leave a Comment
Today, we have a guest feature from Don from Classic Poetry Aloud (iTunes - Feed - Web Site), which offers a great lineup of poetry podcasts. They have just kicked off a week dedicated to war poetry, which includes pieces by Shakespeare, Coleridge and Melville, among others. Below, Don offers a very helpful survey of [...]
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Bestselling writer Jonathan Lethem — author of one of my favorite novels Motherless Brooklyn — has put together an offer that’s hard to beat. He’ll sell you a story for a book, play, or screenplay for a mere $1. Then you can take the story idea, make it your own, and move it in new [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
Every year the folks at the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest celebrate their love for bad prose by running “a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.” They’ve just announced this year’s champion sentences and they’re well worth a read. The contest accepts entries year-round, [...]
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The Guardian Books Podcast has started offering an audiobook version of the young adult novel Wolf Brother as a serial podcast. The story is the first in a series of books by Michelle Paver called Chronicles of Ancient Darkness. It makes good audio since it’s gripping and not hard to follow (or get back into [...]
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A quick heads up: You can read an excerpt from J.M. Coetzee’s upcoming novel, Diary of a Bad Year, over at The New York Review of Books. The entire novel will be published in January 2008. And, in case you weren’t already aware of it, Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. You [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Books, Current Affairs, History, Literature | ≅ 3 Comments
Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – It’s a major work of the Enlightenment, a book that shaped how we moderns write history (and, for that matter, how we aspire to write in the English language), and it’s now available as a free podcast thanks to Librivox. Or at least [...]
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Today, we’re speaking with Susanne Dunlap, author of Liszt’s Kiss, a recently published novel that brings you back to 1832 Paris and the musical worlds of Franz Liszt and another central character, the Countess Anne de Barbier-Chouant.
DC: Before we begin, please tell us a little bit about who you are as a person, and who [...]
≡ Category: Books, Literature, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Leave a Comment
John Irving published a long defense of German author Günter Grass’s new memoir, Peeling the Onion in the New York Times Book Review yesterday. The book created a storm of when it came out in German last year. Grass, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999, revealed that he spent the last months [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Books, Literature | ≅ 6 Comments
This is a book that needs no introduction, but we will give it a short one anyway. Published in serial format between 1918 and 1920, James Joyce’s Ulysses was initially reviled by many and banned in the US and UK until the 1930s. Today, it’s widely considered a classic in modernist literature, and The Modern [...]
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Almost 20 years ago, Salman Rushdie published his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, never realizing how this literary event would change his life. The Ayatollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran’s religious and political revolution, saw in the book “blasphemous” depictions of the prophet Muhammad, and then handed down a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death. [...]
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While our collection of foreign language lessons podcasts has been getting a fair amount of love and attention lately, we’ve been sprucing up our directory of audio book podcasts.
To this list of English-language classics, we’ve added three new classics by Jane Austen — Persuasion, Mansfield Park, and Northanger Abbey — all of which are byproducts [...]
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The PEN American Center just wound up World Voices 2007, a conference featuring a slew of major authors, including Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Neil Gaiman, and many more. One of the panels this year featured some literary heavy hitters reading works to raise awareness for environmental issues: Billy Collins, Jonathan Franzen, Moses Isegawa, Pico Iyer, [...]
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Here’s a quick fyi for poetry fans: PennSound has released on its site
rare audio recordings by modernist
poet, Ezra Pound (October 30, 1885 – November 1, 1972) and, along with them, a helpful essay called The Sound of Pound: A Listener’s Guide by Richard Sieburth. The audio clips largely come out of two major [...]
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Stephen Greenblatt, a Harvard professor, leading Shakespeare scholar, and author of the 2005 bestseller Will in the World, penned a piece in the latest New York Review of Books that surveys Shakespeare’s politics — his take on the uses and abuses of political power. The piece starts in a wonderful way, so forgive us for [...]
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Among the growing collections of free audio book podcasts, you’ll find a large number of "thrillers"
that grew out of the American and British literary traditions. It’s perhaps safe to say that the volunteers who record these books like a good, fear-inducing read. But who doesn’t?
The list of suspenseful novels available as free podcasts [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ 2 Comments
Here’s a quick little find for the poetry lover: A slew of early poems by Wallace Stevens, the great American poet, can now be downloaded as podcasts (iTunes). They include many classics — Anecdote of the Jar, The Emperor of Ice Cream, Peter Quince at the Clavier, Sunday Morning, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a [...]
