≡ Category: Audio Books, Books, e-books, Film, Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
Today is the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens. He was born in Portsmouth, England on February 7, 1812, the second of eight children. When he was 12 years old his father was sent to debtors’ prison, along with most of his family, and Charles went to live with a friend of the family, an impoverished [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Radio | ≅ 4 Comments
Permit us to stay on our recent sci-fi tangent just a tad bit longer…. Between 1951 and 1953, Isaac Asimov published three books that formed the now legendary Foundation Trilogy. Many considered it a masterwork in science fiction, and that view became official doctrine in 1966 when the trilogy received a special Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series, [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Books, e-books, Sci Fi | ≅ 4 Comments
Although he died when he was only 53 years old, Philip K. Dick (1928 – 1982) published 44 novels and 121 short stories during his lifetime and solidified his position as arguably the most literary of science fiction writers. His novel Ubik appears on TIME magazine’s list of the 100 best English-language novels, and Dick is the only science fiction [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, e-books, Film, Language Lessons, Online Courses | ≅ 8 Comments
Santa left a new Kindle, iPad or other media player under your tree. He did his job. Now we’ll do ours. We’ll tell you how to fill those devices with free intelligent media — great books, movies, courses, and all of the rest. And if you didn’t get a new gadget, fear not. You can [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, e-books, Literature | ≅ 2 Comments
Neil Gaiman is one of the handful of writers who has made comics respectable over the past several decades. He has written some classic children’s stories, plus a novel that will be adapted by HBO. A great deal of his output, though, has been in the form of short stories, and we have pulled together some free [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Books, e-books, Physics | ≅ 102 Comments
A Reddit.com user posed the question to Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Which books should be read by every single intelligent person on the planet?” Below, you will find the book list offered up by the astrophysicist, director of the Hayden Planetarium, and popularizer of science. Where possible, we have included links to free versions of the books, all [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Literature | ≅ 3 Comments
Before the days of Harry Potter, generations of young readers let their imaginations take flight with The Chronicles of Narnia, a series of seven fantasy novels written by C. S. Lewis. Like his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis served on the English faculty at Oxford University and took part in the Inklings, an Oxford literary group dedicated to fiction and [...]
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James Franco gave The Paris Review a hand when he jumped into bed and started reading “William Wei,” a short story published in a recent edition of the storied literary journal. Find a cleaned up audio file here, or in our collection of Free Audio Books. Last year, the aspiring writer and Yale doctoral student also [...]
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Close the doors. Shut the blinds. Turn out the lights. Make that room dark. Get ready for Alfred Hitchcock Presents Ghost Stories for Young People. Originally recorded in 1962, the album features 11 ghost stories introduced by Hitchcock himself and then read by actor John Allen. You can sample the audio above (and find the remaining [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Books, Media | ≅ 6 Comments
We all know where books come from: a human and a muse meet, fall in love, and two months to twenty years later, a book is born. Then, as with other varieties of babies, the sleepless nights start as a writer searches for a home for the book, collecting rejections like badges of honor, testaments [...]