Just like most of you Open Culture readers, I’m a sucker for cultural intersections, the places where music meets painting, poetry meets computing, language meets architecture, and so on. I feel an even greater thrill when two respected creators team up to accomplish this; the more unlikely and inadvertent the combination, the better.

Give this one a minute to get going, to get beyond the schtick. And then you’ll enter the world of Chip Kidd, associate art director at Knopf, who has designed covers for many famous books.

If you ask Stephen King, he’ll tell you that H.P. Lovecraft was “the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.” And Joyce Carol Oates will readily admit that Lovecraft had “an incalculable influence on succeeding generations of writers of horror fiction.

Last week we gave you “ein Stop-Motion” animation of Ernest Hemingway’s little classic, The Old Man and the Sea, set to “Sail” by AWOLNATION. How can we possibly connect the dots and give you another maritime mashup this week? Easy-peasy.

“David Foster Wallace’s writing sort of lends itself to being read aloud,” says actor Brian Elerding. He understates the case; at times, Wallace seems to have crafted his prose specifically to reflect and embody spoken language.

A couple weeks back, we mentioned that you can download a finely-read audio version of James Joyce’s Ulysses for free. What that version doesn’t include — and couldn’t include — are etchings by Henri Matisse.

Neil Gaiman’s novelette, The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains, won the Locus Poll Award for Best Novelette. And it’s now available online in text and audio.

If you’ve ever spent any time with old books, or stepped into the right used bookstore, you’ve encountered that distinctive smell.

Like fellow genre icon Stephen King, Ray Bradbury has reached far beyond his established audience by offering writing advice to anyone who puts pen to paper. (Or keys to keyboard; “Use whatever works,” he often says.

The online bookseller Good Books donates 100 percent of its retail profit to Oxfam’s charity projects, which tells you the sense of moral “good” their name means to evoke.