≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Comments
This little collection gives you access to Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), one of America’s great poets, reading his own poetry. Among the poems, you will hear “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain,” “Vacancy in the Park,” and “To an Old Philosopher in Rome.” For more, you should [...]
≡ Category: History, Literature | ≅ Comments
We’re lucky to have Anne Frank’s diary — lucky that the diary was ever discovered, and lucky, too, that someone took a chance on publishing the eventual bestseller. This is all nicely outlined by Francine Prose, who has a new book out called Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife. You can listen to her [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Comments
Or so that’s the claim of Brian Vickers, a professor at the Institute of English Studies at the University of London. According to a short piece in The New York Times, a software package called Pl@giarism, usually used to detect cheating students, demonstrates that “The Reign of King Edward III,” a play published anonymously in [...]
≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ Comments
James Ellroy’s new crime fiction novel, Blood’s a Rover, takes you back to the tumultuous summer of 1968, to a world inhabited by J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, the Black Panthers, and the mob running their rackets in the Dominican Republic. Above, in his own inimitable style, Ellroy gives you the scoop on how he [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Comments
This morning, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to the Romanian author, Herta Muller. There’s a good chance that you’re not familiar with her work. So let me steer you to this profile in the Telegraph. You can also read this excerpted interview that goes back to 1999. If I come across any media [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Comments
Vladimir Nabokov admired Franz Kafka’s novella, “The Metamorphosis.” Hence the lecture that Nabokov dedicated to the work here. But he also saw some small ways to improve the story, or at least the English translation of it. Below, we have some edits that Nabokov penned himself. And, just as an fyi, you can download a free audio [...]
≡ Category: Film, Literature | ≅ Comments
In 1999, Aleksandr Petrov won the Academy Award for Short Film (among other awards) for a film that follows the plot line of Ernest Hemingway’s classic novella, The Old Man and the Sea (1952). As noted here, Petrov’s technique involves painting pastels on glass, and he and his son painted a total of 29,000 [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Comments
It’s a happy trend. Increasingly, we’re seeing museums launching dynamic online exhibitions to accompany their exhibitions on the ground. In the past, we highlighted the Tate Modern’s panoramic tour of Mark Rothko’s work. And now we point you to The Life and Work of William Butler Yeats, an online exhibition created by The National Library of [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Comments
A quick note: The Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, is commemorating the 2009 bicentennial of Edgar Allan Poe, American poet, critic and inventor of the detective story, with the exhibition “From Out That Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe.” To mark [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Comments
The poem was W.H. Auden’s. The date marked the moment when Germany invaded Poland, initiating the start of World War II. “September 1, 1939″ was originally published in The New Republic on October 18, 1939. You can find the text of the poem here. Plus, you can also read George Orwell’s account of what happened that historic day [...]
≡ Category: Law, Literature | ≅ Comments
Crime writer Dominick Dunne passed yesterday today at 83, his death overshadowed by that of Ted Kennedy. Above, we feature Dunne remembering his rather unpleasant relationship with Frank Sinatra. It’s a perverse story, though told in a somewhat humorous way.
Initially, I considered featuring another video, but it’s entirely too sad, especially for any parents among [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Books, Literature | ≅ Comments
A quick note: Audible has recently launched a series called the Audible Modern Vanguard (more details here) that brings groundbreaking works and authors into unabridged audio for the first time. Here, you’ll find works by Paul Auster (one of my faves), Saul Bellow, John Cheever, John Irving, Kurt Vonnegut, and William Kennedy.
There are some good “reads” [...]
≡ Category: Amazon Kindle, Literature, e-books | ≅ Comments
Even though we sometimes give Amazon’s Kindle a hard time, the device is undoubtedly handy for reading e-books. The Kindle lets you seamlessly download books straight from Amazon in a matter of seconds. And, even better, you can load the Kindle with thousands of free e-books from sources such as Project Gutenberg. (Few people know [...]
≡ Category: Literature, Television | ≅ Comments
If you’ve watched The Wire, you know him as Jimmy McNulty, the smart, boozing Baltimore cop that likes an occasional romp and goes rogue here and there. Now, here’s your chance to see another side of Dominic, the side that’s more at home, at least geographically speaking. Here we have, as Ed tells us, the [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Literature | ≅ Comments
On Bloomsday (June 16), BoingBoing featured a rare audio recording of James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake (mp3). It’s a bit intriguing to hear his voice and accent. Also, we came across another Joyce recording, where, this time, he’s reading Anna Livia Plurabelle, another section of the same novel. For kicks, you can catch an animated [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Comments
The BBC has posted online some 1969 interviews with Vladimir Nabokov. In one piece, Nabokov talks about some of the Russian greats and roundly dismisses Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (my current read) and Crime & Punishment. Ouch. But he saves some kind words for Tolstoy and Joyce. For more, get the interviews here.
via Maud Newton’s [...]
≡ Category: Film, Literature, Theater | ≅ Comments
Thanks to PBS, you can watch online Ian McKellen starring in King Lear, one of Shakesepeare’s finest tragedies. McKellen performed the play first in England (2007), then on a worldwide tour, before filming the production for public television. You can watch it all right here, and if you want to follow the original text, you [...]
≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ Comments
When I develop the curriculum for Stanford’s Continuing Studies program, I often like to create courses around big, hard books that students have long intended to read, but have never quite pulled off: James Joyce’s Ulysess, Plato’s Republic, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, you get the picture. For many students, it takes a course, or something equivalent, [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Literature | ≅ Comments
From The Internet Archive: “Recorded here is the complete, original story The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as penned by Fitzgerald in the early 1920s, published originally in Colliers and finally collected in the popular Tales of the Jazz Age.” You can download and listen to this Fitzgerald story here. Multiple formats are available. We’ve also added [...]
≡ Category: Literature, iPhone | ≅ Comments
Last week, we flagged for you a list called the 100 Best iPhone Apps for Serious Self-Learners. What the list missed is another nice app that puts the complete works of Shakespeare on your iPhone. And, the best part, it’s all free. As you’ll see, the app comes with some handy functionality: you can search the text [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Comments
Via BoingBoing: Rewind the videotape to 1968. Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road, appears (seemingly drunk) on William F. Buckley “Firing Line.” As you’ll see, this meeting of the Beat and the father of modern American conservatism is not exactly filled with substance. But the clip has some historical curiosity. You can find more [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Comments
When Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he was working on a manuscript called The Original of Laura. And he asked that it remain locked in a Swiss vault and never published. His son, Dmitri, who also happens to be his translator and surviving heir, is now wondering what to do with “the most concentrated distillation of [my [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Comments
As a former Sovietologist (skills that today help me understand our public broadcasting system), I read with excitement the New Yorker’s article on the grand bells of Moscow’s Danilov Monastery and their return after 70-some years from the United States to Russia. Writing in the April 27 issue, Harvard grad Elif Batuman notes how bells—not [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Comments
J.G. Ballard, the controversial author of Crash and Empire, died last month. One of our readers (Stephen) pointed us to a Ballard short story published in the Guardian. “The Dying Fall” was little known and never published in a Ballard collection. And it’s here that the modern world collides with the Renaissance.
≡ Category: History, Literature, Philosophy, Stanford | ≅ Comments
A new season of Entitled Opinions (iTunes Feed Web Site) recently got off the ground, and it doesn’t take long to understand what this program is all about. Robert Harrison, the Stanford literature professor who hosts the show, opens the new season with these very words:
Our studios are located below ground, and every time I go down [...]
≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ Comments
Mark Twain died nearly a century ago but that hasn’t slowed him down. Twain has a new book coming out today. It’s called “Who is Mark Twain,” and it brings together 24 previously unpublished stories, one of which you can read over at The Wall Street Journal. The piece is entitled “Frank Fuller and My [...]
≡ Category: Books, Film, Literature | ≅ Comments
J.G. Ballard, the author of Crash and Empire died at 78 this weekend. Here we have a short interview from 1986 where he talks about how violent sensations now lubricate our modern world. It’s this line of thinking that finds its way into Crash, a controversial book that David Cronenberg brought to the big screen in [...]
≡ Category: History, Literature | ≅ Comments
“Over the centuries a number of images have been put forward as life portraits of our greatest writer, but at present none of them is generally accepted as such. Up until now… With the emergence of the Cobbe portrait, we are presented with a contemporary portrait that has strong claims to represent the dramatist as [...]
≡ Category: Literature, Philosophy, Television | ≅ Comments
I’m no fan of Ayn Rand, but I found this footage intriguing. Back before 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace had his own TV interview show, The Mike Wallace Interview, which aired from 1957 to 1960. And what you get is Mike Wallace asking probing questions to celebrities of the day (and peddling cigarettes). An archive of [...]
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