In his 1955 classic, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov described the facial features of his scandalous protagonist, Humbert Humbert, in small bits. When taken together, here’s what you get:

Gloomy good looks… Clean-cut jaw, muscular hand, deep sonorous voice… broad shoulders … I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male; slow-moving, tall, with soft dark hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanor. Exceptional virility often reflects in the subject’s displayable features a sullen and congested something that pertains to what he has to conceal. And this was my case… But instead I am lanky, big-boned, wooly-chested Humbert Humbert, with thick black eyebrows… A cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile… aging ape eyes… Humbert’s face might twitch with neuralgia.

In a rather brilliant move, Brian Joseph Davis has run these descriptions through law enforcement composite sketch software and brought Humbert Humbert almost to life. (See above.) And he has done the same for a cast of other literary characters on his Tumblr, called The Composites. Other characters getting the perp treatment include Emma Bovary (Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary), Edward Rochester (Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre), and Keith Talent (Martin Amis’ London Fields), among others. Find them all here. h/t Metafilter

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Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita: Just Another Great Love Story?

Vladimir Nabokov Marvels Over Different “Lolita” Book Covers

Nabokov Reads Lolita, Names the Great Books of the 20th Century

Famous Literary Characters Visualized with Police Composite Sketch Software is a post from: Open Culture

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.

Related Content:

Download 20 Popular High School Books Available as Free eBooks & Audio Books

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

Today is the birthday of James Joyce, born in Dublin 130 years ago, who wrote in his autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

To celebrate his life, we present an August 1929 recording of Joyce reading a melodious passage from the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” chapter of his Work in Progress, which would be published ten years later as Finnegans Wake. The recording was made in Cambridge, England, at the arrangement of Joyce’s friend and publisher Sylvia Beach. “How beautiful the ‘Anna Livia’ recording is,” wrote Beach in her memoir, Shakespeare and Company, “and how amusing Joyce’s rendering of an Irish washerwoman’s brogue!”

Related Content:

Find works by James Joyce in our collection 300 Free eBooks: Download Great Classics for Free

Death Masks: From Dante to James Joyce and Friedrich Nietzsche

James Joyce Reads ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ from Finnegans Wake is a post from: Open Culture

Henry Miller (from Henry Miller on Writing)

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to the program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can’t create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people; go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it–but go back to it the next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

George Orwell (From Why I Write)

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Margaret Atwood (originally appeared in The Guardian)

1. Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.
2. If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.
3. Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.
4. If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a ­memory stick.
5. Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
6. Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What ­fascinates A will bore the pants off B.
7. You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.
8. You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.
9. Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.
10. Prayer might work. Or reading ­something else. Or a constant visual­isation of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.

Neil Gaiman (read his free short stories here)

1. Write.
2. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
3. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
4. Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
5. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
6. Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
7. Laugh at your own jokes.
8. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

William Safire (the author of the New York Times Magazine column “On Language”)

1. Remember to never split an infinitive.
2. The passive voice should never be used.
3. Do not put statements in the negative form.
4. Verbs have to agree with their subjects.
5. Proofread carefully to see if you words out.
6. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be by rereading and editing.
7. A writer must not shift your point of view.
8. And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.)
9. Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!
10. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
11. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
12. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
13. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
14. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
15. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
16. Always pick on the correct idiom.
17. The adverb always follows the verb.
18. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.

Writing Tips by Henry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell is a post from: Open Culture

Today is the birthday of Richard Brautigan, whose funny and imaginative books were a touchstone for the 1960s counterculture and have remained an inspiration to free spirits ever since. He would have been 77.

In this video, uploaded to the Internet exactly a year ago, Ianthe Brautigan Swensen reads her father’s story, “One Afternoon in 1939,” from his collection Revenge of the Lawn. Ianthe was one year old in 1961 when her father sat down with a portable typewriter on a family camping trip to write his most famous work, Trout Fishing in America, and she was 24 when he took his own life in 1984. Now she’s a writer and a teacher.

In 2001 Brautigan Swensen published You Can’t Catch Death: A Daughter’s Memoir about her life with a difficult but loving father who liked to take her with him to his favorite San Francisco haunts during the 60s. “When I’m here,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle on a visit to the city in 2000, “I still feel my father walking the streets, I still feel my hand in his. And that’s a very happy feeling.”

Richard Brautigan’s Story, ‘One Afternoon in 1939,’ Read From a Wooden Spool is a post from: Open Culture

This past summer, Jonathan Pararajasingham, a neurosurgeon in London, created a montage of 100 renowned academics, mostly all scientists, talking about their thoughts on the existence of God. (Find it in two parts here and here.) Now’s he back with a new video, 30 Renowned Writers Speaking About God. It runs 25 minutes, and it offers as much a critique of orthodox religious belief as it does a literary tribute to humanism and rationalism. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Salman Rushdie (who kindly tweeted us this weekend), Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth — they all make an appearance. The full list of writers appears below the jump.

And, before we close, let me say this. Whenever we post videos like these, we get the question. Why the occasional focus on atheism/rationalism/humanism? And the simple answer comes down to this: If you cover writers, academics and scientists, the thinking skews in that direction. Yes, there are exceptions, but they are in shorter supply. But if someone pulls them together and makes a montage, we’ll likely feature it too. H/T RichardDawkins.net

Note: As you may have noticed, we have been experiencing intermittent outages over the past couple of days. Our host, Dreamhost, has been stumbling more than we’d like. So we’re figuring out alternatives and hopefully making a move soon. Our apologies for the inconvenience!

1. Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Science Fiction Writer
2. Nadine Gordimer, Nobel Laureate in Literature
3. Professor Isaac Asimov, Author and Biochemist
4. Arthur Miller, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Playwright
5. Wole Soyinka, Nobel Laureate in Literature
6. Gore Vidal, Award-Winning Novelist and Political Activist
7. Douglas Adams, Best-Selling Science Fiction Writer
8. Professor Germaine Greer, Writer and Feminist
9. Iain Banks, Best-Selling Fiction Writer
10. José Saramago, Nobel Laureate in Literature
11. Sir Terry Pratchett, NYT Best-Selling Novelist
12. Ken Follett, NYT Best-Selling Author
13. Ian McEwan, Man Booker Prize-Winning Novelist
14. Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate (1999-2009)
15. Professor Martin Amis, Award-Winning Novelist
16. Michel Houellebecq, Goncourt Prize-Winning French Novelist
17. Philip Roth, Man Booker Prize-Winning Novelist
18. Margaret Atwood, Booker Prize-Winning Author and Poet
19. Sir Salman Rushdie, Booker Prize-Winning Novelist
20. Norman MacCaig, Renowned Scottish Poet
21. Phillip Pullman, Best-Selling British Author
22. Dr Matt Ridley, Award-Winning Science Writer
23. Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate in Literature
24. Howard Brenton, Award-Winning English Playwright
25. Tariq Ali, Award-Winning Writer and Filmmaker
26. Theodore Dalrymple, English Writer and Psychiatrist
27. Roddy Doyle, Booker Prize-Winning Novelist
28. Redmond O’Hanlon FRSL, British Writer and Scholar
29. Diana Athill, Award-Winning Author and Literary Editor
30. Christopher Hitchens, Best-Selling Author, Award-Winning Columnist

30 Renowned Writers Speaking About God & Reason is a post from: Open Culture

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore offers a modern tribute to an old world. Made with an animation style that blends stop motion with computer animation and traditional hand-drawing, the silent film pays homage to a bygone era when elegantly printed books inhabited our world. The 15-minute short is the first made by Moonbot Studios, a fledgling animation shop in Shreveport, Louisiana. For their efforts, Moonbot’s founders (William Joyce, Brandon Oldenburg and Lampton Enochs) received an Oscar-nomination this week (Best Animated Short), putting them in competition with two other films featured on Open Culture: Sunday and Wild Life.

We recommend watching The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore in “Couch mode” on Vimeo, or downloading it for free in HD from iTunes. iPad owners will also want to consider buying the related app ($4.99) that turns the film into an interactive narrative experience.

For more animated bibliophilia, don’t miss:

Spike Jonze Presents a Stop Motion Film for Bibliophiles

Books Savored in Stop Motion Film

Going West: A Stop Motion Novel

Books Come to Life in Classic Cartoons from 1930s and 1940s

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore: An Oscar-Nominated Film for Book Lovers is a post from: Open Culture

Here we go again. We’re getting meta with readings by the great Christopher Walken. It all starts with the actor appearing on a 1993 broadcast of the British TV series “Saturday Zoo” hosted by Jonathan Ross, and he’s reading and riffing on the beloved fairy tale, The Story of the Three Little Pigs. The potentially terrifying story is uncharacteristically jolly. Walken goes for laughs, not chills. The same can’t be said for the next tale.

We’re not clear on the backstory of this reading. But we do know Walken is reading Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, The Raven, and stays true to the original text published in 1845. The Raven made Poe famous then, and it remains influential today — so much so they named a football team after the poem. How many other sports teams can make such a claim?

And then we come full circle again. Almost 16 years after Walken’s reading of The Three Little Pigs, the star returned to another show hosted by Jonathan Ross (BBC’s Friday Night) and served up a second comic reading. This time it’s “Poker Face” by the inescapable Lady Gaga.

Walken reading Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak? If only, if only …..

Christopher Walken Reads The Three Little Pigs, The Raven, and a Little Lady Gaga is a post from: Open Culture

Back in 1998, Hunter S. Thompson’s most famous piece of Gonzo journalism, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, was brought to the silver screen, with Johnny Depp playing a lead role. From this point forward, Depp and Thompson became fast friends. Indeed, Depp would end up paying for Thompson’s elaborate funeral, which involved shooting the writer’s ashes out of a cannon to the tune of Norman Greenbaum’s Spirit in the Sky and Bob Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man.

Above we feature Johnny reading aloud some letters he received from Hunter. The letters are very Thompson-esque, which means, among things, they’re NOT SAFE for work! Part 2 can be found here, and Part 3 here.

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Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary: a ‘Warped Casablanca’

Johnny Depp Reads Letters from Hunter S. Thompson (NSFW) is a post from: Open Culture

Originally aired on 1950s French television, this clip gives you some vintage Vladimir Nabokov. Early on, the Russian novelist reads the wonderfully poetic first lines of Lolita:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

Then we get down to real business. Putting on his literary critic cap, Nabokov tells us what 20th novels make real or pretend claims to greatness. First the fakers:

I’ve been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called “great books.” That, for instance, Mann’s asinine Death in Venice, or Pasternak’s melodramatic, vilely written Doctor Zhivago, or Faulkner’s corncobby chronicles can be considered masterpieces, or at least what journalists term “great books,” is to me the same sort of absurd delusion as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair.

And then the true greats in order of personal preference:

1) James Joyce’s Ulysses

2) Kafka’s The Metamorphosis

3) Andrei Bely’s St. Petersburg

4) The first half of Proust’s fairy tale, In Search of Lost Time

We’re adding this video to our Cultural Icons collection, which features great writers, artists and thinkers speaking in their own words. And if we have piqued your interest, don’t miss these other Nabokov gems:

Nabokov Tweaks Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”

Vladimir Nabokov Marvels Over Different “Lolita” Book Covers

Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita: Just Another Great Love Story?

Nabokov Reads Lolita, Names the Great Books of the 20th Century is a post from: Open Culture