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 old lady. He was forced to quit school and work in a blacking factory, where he pasted labels on jars of shoe polish.

Dickens never forgot those early traumas. He incorporated his experiences and observations of social injustice into his works, including David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol. (Find free novels below.) He was the most popular writer of Victorian England, a virtual rock star in the days before recorded music and movies. His stories, published serially in magazines, were eagerly awaited by the public. Most have remained in print ever since.

The Dickens bicentenary is being celebrated with special events around the world, including a wreath-laying ceremony this morning at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, where actor and filmmaker Ralph Fiennes, author Claire Tomalin, and two of Dickens’s descendants are scheduled to give readings. For a listing of events today and throughout the year, go to Dickens2012.org. Also take a look at the short retrospective of Dickens-inspired movies (above) from the British Film Institute.

To help celebrate, we have gathered together some of the best Dickens material from across the Web:

Films (see our complete list of Free Movies):

• Great Expectations: The classic 1946 version directed by David Lean and starring John Mills, Bernard Miles, Finlay Currie, Jean Simmons, Martita Hunt and Alec Guinness. The film won Academy Awards for Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography.
• Oliver Twist: Another classic by David Lean, this 1948 film stars John Howard Davies as Oliver and Alec Guinness as Fagin. In 1999 it was ranked 46th on the BFI’s list of the top 100 British films of all time.
• A Tale of Two Cities: The 1958 film by Ralph Thomas, starring Dirk Bogarde as Sydney Carton and Dorothy Tutin as Lucie Manette. The film was shot in France’s Loire Valley, with several thousand U.S. soldiers, posted in nearby Orleans, cast as extras.
• A Christmas Carol: George C. Scott gives an excellent performance as Ebenezer Scrooge in this critically acclaimed 1984 film directed by Clive Donner. It premiered in America on CBS television, and was released theatrically in Great Britain.
• David Copperfield: A 2000 U.S.-Irish television adaptation starring Hugh Dancy as David Copperfield, Michael Richards as Wilkins Micawber and Sally Field as Betsey Trotwood.
• The Pickwick Papers: A 1952 film, adapted and directed by Noel Langley and starring James Hayter as Samuel Pickwick.

eBooks (see our complete list of Free eBooks)

• A Christmas Carol – Read Online – Download Multiple Formats - Kindle
• A Tale of Two Cities – Read Online – Download Multiple Formats
• Bleak House – Read Online – Download Multiple Formats – Kindle
• David Copperfield – Read Online – Download Multiple Formats
• Great Expectations – Read Online – Download Multiple Formats –Kindle
• Hard Times – Read Online – Download Multiple Formats
• Mystery of Edwin Drood – Read Online – Download Multiple Formats
• Oliver Twist – Read Online – Download Multiple Formats - Kindle

Audio Books (see our complete list of Free Audio Books)

• A Christmas Carol – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File
• A Tale of Two Cities – Free iTunes - Free MP3 Zip File
• A Collection of Christmas Stories - Free iTunes
• Bleak House – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File
• David Copperfield – Free iTunes – Free MP3
• Great Expectations – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File
• Hard Times – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File
• Oliver Twist – Free iTunes – Free MP3

NOTE: If we’re missing a good Dickens novel, don’t forget Audible.com’s 14 day trial. It will let you download an audio book for free, pretty much any one you want, and they’re all narrated and produced in a professional format. Get details here.

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Celebrate the 200th Birthday of Charles Dickens with Free Movies, eBooks and Audio Books is a post from: Open Culture

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, notably beating out Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. (Don’t miss the vintage Tolkien documentary we featured yesterday.)

Eventually, the BBC decided to adapt Asimov’s trilogy to the radio, dramatizing the series in eight one-hour episodes that aired between May and June 1973. Years later, you can buy the radio drama on iTunes for $9.99. But we’re going to suggest that you pocket that hard-earned money and download the radio drama for free from the Internet Archive.

Click the links below to stream the individual episodes. Or download the full program as a zip file. The Internet Archive gives you more download options here.

Part 1 |MP3| Part 2 |MP3| Part 3 |MP3| Part 4 |MP3| Part 5 |MP3| Part 6 |MP3| Part 7 |MP3| Part 8 |MP3|

More Free Sci-Fi & Fantasy:

Download the Complete Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis for Free

Aldous Huxley Reads Dramatized Version of Brave New World

Free Philip K. Dick: Download 11 Great Science Fiction Stories

Neil Gaiman’s Free Short Stories

Free Audio Books

Free: Isaac Asimov’s Epic Foundation Trilogy Dramatized in Classic Audio is a post from: Open Culture

If you’re not intimately familiar with his novels, then you assuredly know major films based on Dick’s work – Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly and Minority Report. Today, we bring you another way to get acquainted with his writing. We’re presenting a selection of Dick’s stories available for free on the web. Below we have culled together 11 short stories from our collection of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books. And, just as an fyi, you could always snag one of Dick’s novels (in audio) by signing up for Audible.com’s no-strings-attached Free Trial program. Get details here.

eTexts (find download instructions here)

• “Beyond the Door” – Multiple formats – iTunes
  • First published in 1954, the text is not usually found in collections of Dick’s writings.
• “Beyond Lies the Wub” – Multiple formats – iTunes
  • Dick’s first published story. Originally appeared in Planet Stories in July, 1952.
• “Mr. Spaceship” – Multiple Formats
  • Appeared first in Imagination in 1953, and later in The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick.
• “Piper in the Woods” – Multiple Formats
  • First published in 1953 in the fantasy and science fiction magazine, Imagination.
• “Second Variety” – Multiple Formats
  • Influential short story first published in Space Science Fiction Magazine in May 1953.
• “The Crystal Crypt” – Multiple Formats
  • Sci-fi story published in the January 1952 edition of Planet Stories.
• “The Defenders” – Multiple Formats – iTunes
  • A 1953 sci-fi story that laid the foundation for Dick’s 1964 novel The Penultimate Truth.
• “The Eyes Have It” – Multiple Formats – iTunes
  • One of the shortest, if not the shortest, of all of Philip K. Dick’s many short stories.
• “The Gun” – Multiple Formats – iTunes
  • A 1952 sci-fi story that later appeared in The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick.
• “The Skull” – Multiple Formats – iTunes
  • Same as right above.
• “The Variable Man” – Multiple Formats
  • A 1953 novella written/sold by Philip K. Dick before he had an agent.

Audio

• “Beyond Lies the Wub” – Free MP3
• “Beyond the Door” – Free MP3
• “Second Variety” – Free MP3 Zip File – Stream Online
• “The Defenders” - Free MP3
• “The Variable Man” – Free MP3 Zip File – Stream Online

P.S. Don’t miss the film Philip K. Dick: A Day in the Afterlife (1994), a documentary appearing in our collection of Free Movies Online.

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The Ware Tetralogy: Free SciFi Download

Free Philip K. Dick: Download 11 Great Science Fiction Stories is a post from: Open Culture

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 access all of these materials on the good old fashioned computer. Here we go:

Free eBooks: You have always wanted to read the great works. And now is your chance. When you dive into our Free eBooks collection you will find 300 great works by some classic writers (Dickens, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare and Tolstoy) and contemporary writers (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, and Kurt Vonnegut). The collection also gives you access to the 51-volume Harvard Classics. Read these foundational texts, and you’ll be well on your way to giving yourself a proper liberal education.

If you need help loading files to your eBook reader, Project Gutenberg provides tutorials here, and one of our previous posts explains how to upload files specifically to your Kindle.

Free Audio Books: What better way to spend your free time than listening to some of the greatest books ever written? This page contains a vast number of free audio books, including works by Arthur Conan Doyle, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, George Orwell and more recent writers — Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Carver, etc. You can download these classic books straight to your mp3 player, then listen as you go.

[Note: If you're looking for a more recent book, you can download one free audio book from Audible.com. Grab that new Steve Jobs biography, or pretty much any other audio book you want. Find details on Audible's no-strings-attached deal here.]

Free Courses: This list brings together over 400 free courses from leading universities, including Stanford, Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, Oxford and beyond. These full-fledged courses range across all disciplines – history, physics, philosophy, psychology and beyond. All of these courses are available in audio, and roughly 65% are available in video. You can’t receive credits or certificates for these courses. But the amount of personal enrichment you will derive here is immeasurable.

Free Movies: With a click of a mouse, or a tap of your touch screen, you will have access to 435 great movies. The collection hosts many classics, westerns, indies, documentaries, silent films and film noir favorites. It features work by some of our great directors (Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard and David Lynch) and performances by cinema legends: John Wayne, Jack Nicholson, Audrey Hepburn, Charlie Chaplin, and beyond. On this one page, you will find thousands of hours of cinema bliss.

Free Language Lessons: Perhaps learning a new language is high on your list of 2012 New Year’s resolutions. Well, here is a great way to do it. Take your pick of 40 languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, Mandarin, English, Russian, Dutch, even Finnish, Yiddish and Esperanto. These lessons are all free and ready to download.

Free Textbooks: And one last item for the lifelong learners among you. We have scoured the web and pulled together a list of 150 Free Textbooks. It’s a great resource particularly if you’re looking to learn math, computer science or physics on your own. There might be a diamond in the rough here for you.

Thank Santa, maybe thank us, and enjoy that new device….

Fill Your New Kindle, iPad, iPhone with Free eBooks, Movies, Audio Books, Courses & More is a post from: Open Culture

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 copies for you today. Some stories are available in audio and video, others in text. (We have them all separately listed in our collections of Free Audio Books and eBooks):

Audio & Video

And, since it’s certainly timely, we leave you with Gaiman’s New Year’s Eve message delivered to a crowd in Boston several years ago:

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art – write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. May your coming year be a wonderful thing in which you dream both dangerously and outrageously.

I hope you will make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and you will be liked and you will have people to love and to like in return. And most importantly, because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now – I hope that you will, when you need to, be wise and that you will always be kind. And I hope that somewhere in the next year you surprise yourself.

Mark Linsenmayer runs the Partially Examined Life philosophy podcast and blog. He also performs with the Madison, WI band New People.

Neil Gaiman’s Free Short Stories is a post from: Open Culture

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 taken from our Free Audio Books and Free eBooks collections. Or you can always download a professionally-narrated book for free from Audible.com. Details here.

If you’re looking for a more extensive list of essential works, don’t miss The Harvard Classics, a 51 volume series that you can now download online.

1.) The Bible (eBook) - “to learn that it’s easier to be told by others what to think and believe than it is to think for yourself.”

2.) The System of the World by Isaac Newton (eBook) – “to learn that the universe is a knowable place.”

3.) On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (eBook – Audio Book) - “to learn of our kinship with all other life on Earth.”

4.) Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (eBook – Audio Book) – “to learn, among other satirical lessons, that most of the time humans are Yahoos.”

5.) The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine (eBook – Audio Book) – “to learn how the power of rational thought is the primary source of freedom in the world.”

6.) The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (eBook – Audio Book) - “to learn that capitalism is an economy of greed, a force of nature unto itself.”

7.) The Art of War by Sun Tsu (eBook – Audio Book) - “to learn that the act of killing fellow humans can be raised to an art.”

8.) The Prince by Machiavelli (eBook – Audio Book) - “to learn that people not in power will do all they can to acquire it, and people in power will do all they can to keep it.”

Tyson concludes by saying: “If you read all of the above works you will glean profound insight into most of what has driven the history of the western world.”

He has also added  some more thoughts in the comments section below, saying:

Thanks for this ongoing interest in my book suggestions. From some of your reflections, it looks like the intent of the list was not as clear as I thought. The one-line comment after each book is not a review but a statement about how the book’s content influenced the behavior of people who shaped the western world. So, for example, it does no good to say what the Bible “really” meant, if its actual influence on human behavior is something else. Again, thanks for your collective interest. -NDTyson

H/T goes to Galley Cat

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Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read is a post from: Open Culture

Now, with the apparent blessing of the C.S. Lewis estate, the seven volume series is available in a free audio format. There are 101 audio recordings in total, each averaging 30 minutes and read by Chrissi Hart. Download the complete audio via the web or RSS Feed.

We have added The Chronicles of Narnia recordings to our collection of Free Audio Books, where you will find many other great classics. h/t metafilter

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Free Audio: Download the Complete Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis is a post from: Open Culture

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 made a cameo appearance in Gary Shteyngart’s rather hilarious video trailer for his novel, Super Sad True Love Story.

A short story by Franco, “Just Before the Black,” appears in Esquire. His fiction collection, Palo Alto, can be picked up here.

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James Franco Reads Short Story in Bed for The Paris Review is a post from: Open Culture

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 parts here, here, here, and here), or download a pristine audio copy via Amazon or iTunes. For more Hitchcock goodness, don’t miss our collection of Free Hitchock Films and François Truffaut’s 12 Hour Interview with Hitchcock from 1962.

Thanks to @BrainPicker for the great tip on the ghost stories.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents Ghost Stories for Young People (Audio) is a post from: Open Culture

Well, that was the old-fashioned way. We’ve all heard how the internet has leveled the playing field, allowing anybody to publish work and find an audience. However, this easier path to publication hasn’t necessarily solved an even older writer’s conundrum: How to pay for it.

That is, how to make enough money to sustain yourself as you write (day jobs aside). And so writers must become even wilier. Though you may make money from the sale of a book, how do you fund yourself before the book?

Seth Harwood, the author of three books, is at the front of the movement to find alternate and creative ways of not only reaching audiences, but pursuing the writing life. Since graduating from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 2002, Harwood has built up a loyal fan base—his “Palms Mamas and Palms Daddies” (named for one of his protagonists, Jack Palms)—through social media and free podcasting. Harwood is sustaining a writing life along a path that is likely to be more and more common for writers.

After offering his first novel, Jack Wakes Up, as a free audiobook, Harwood published it in paperback with Breakneck Books in 2008. The Amazon sales, pushed by Palms Mamas and Palms Daddies, landed the book in #1 in Crime/Mystery and #45 overall, bringing the attention of Random House, who re-published the book one year later.

Looking outside mainstream avenues, Harwood secured funding for publication of his next venture, Young Junius, with Tyrus Books by preselling signed copies through Paypal—before the books existed in physical form. And now he is one of the early adopters of using Kickstarter to pay for the gestation and birth of not one book—but five previously-written works in the next six months–as he puts it, “raising the fixed costs of bringing these books to the marketplace.” His Kickstarter campaign based around This Is Life, the sequel to Jack Wakes Up was—impressively—fully funded within 25 hours—and with a few days still left to go, it has exceeded the original goal by over $2000.

What can a writer offer besides an autographed copy of the to-be-written book, or a mention in the acknowledgements? For Harwood’s project, the pledges range from a dollar to $999, with thank-yous spanning from the aforementioned to—at the $999 end—an original novella written according to the donor’s wishes and published as a one-off hardcover.

As more and more writers become cynical about the mainstream publishing industry, and the limits it places on writers, and as the internet breaks down barriers between writers and readers, alternate paths of drawing audiences to the writing/publishing process may become more and more popular. In none other than the New York Times Book Review, Neal Pollack recently declared his intention to self-publish his next book using Kickstarter to generate his fixed costs and “an advance,” and last week bestseller Paulo Coelho discussed his decision to offer his novels for free online. (You can find free ebooks by Coelho here.)

Indeed, now more than ever, it seems essential for authors to meet readers at least half-way. Harwood considers himself an “author-preneur,” developing new business models as he publishes his books. As he sees it, innovation comes much more easily to an author acting alone, than to a large publishing company or big corporation. He aims for the new models as he sees them developing, knowing he’s got to go out and find readers himself. As Coelho declares, “The ivory tower does not exist anymore.”

This post was contributed by Shawna Yang Ryan. Her novel Water Ghosts was a finalist for the 2010 Asian American Literary Award. In 2012, she will be the Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Kickstarter: the Future of Self-Publishing? is a post from: Open Culture