≡ Category: Audio Books, Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
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 | ≅ Leave a Comment
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 | ≅ 1 Comment
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 | ≅ 1 Comment
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 | ≅ Leave a Comment
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 | ≅ Leave a Comment
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 | ≅ Leave a Comment
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 | ≅ Leave a Comment
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 | ≅ Leave a Comment
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 | ≅ Leave a Comment
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 | ≅ 1 Comment
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 | ≅ 1 Comment
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 | ≅ 1 Comment
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 | ≅ 1 Comment
“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 | ≅ Leave a Comment
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 [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
The TED conference has featured several talks about creativity in recent years. Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) gave a little spiel about “creative genius” at this year’s conference. Before that, famed psychologist Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi spoke about the relationship between creativity and happiness. (It all boils down to “flow.”) And now we feature novelist Amy Tan (The [...]
≡ Category: History, Life, Literature, Philosophy | ≅ 2 Comments
Writing in The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier offers a response to the Feb 25 piece in the NYTimes: In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth. His argument is worth a read, and here is one lengthy money quote:
The complaint against the humanities is that they are impractical. This is true. They will not change the [...]
≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
When David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest) committed suicide last September, he left behind family, friends and an unfinished third novel, The Pale King. This week, The New Yorker takes a long look at Wallace’s life, career, bouts with depression, and the novel he began in 1997. The magazine has also posted an excerpt of The [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
You can now find some new writings of the Beat author William S. Burroughs on eBay. What’s up for bid here is not a long lost novel, or an early draft of Naked Lunch. Nope, it’s simply Burroughs’ shopping list, a little note reminding him to pick up some cans of Coke, cat food, vodka, [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
John Cheever’s story “Of Love: A Testimony” hasn’t been anthologized or reprinted since it was originally published in 1943. Now, you can find it online at Fivechapters.com. Throughout the week, Fivechapters will roll out the story in nice daily installments, as is their general custom.
via LA Times Books
≡ Category: Books, Literature, e-books | ≅ 3 Comments
Wow. Point your mobile web browser to books.google.com/m and you can read full books on your portable device. According to The Globe and Mail, Google is making 500,000 books, most from the public domain, freely available to you. And if you live in the US, the number will reach 1.5 million. The collection includes works [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
A good find by the LA Times Books Blog that we picked up on Twitter: Somewhere back in the Sports Illustrated archive, you’ll find William Faulkner writing in 1955 about seeing his first hockey game (the Rangers v. the Montreal Canadiens at Madison Square Garden). And then we have Don Delillo doing his own piece in 1972, [...]
≡ Category: Comedy, Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
Elizabeth Alexander recited one of her own poems at Obama’s inauguration last week and now talks poetry (both highbrow and lowbrow) with Stephen Colbert. All in all, she does a pretty good job of hanging in there.
≡ Category: Literature, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Leave a Comment
Michael Gough (I believe) reads the poem that launched T.S. Eliot’s career in 1917, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (get the full text of the poem here)
For more free downloads of classic audio books and poetry, see our complete collection.
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≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
One of America’s great writers, John Updike, gave an interview this week on San Francisco’s airwaves. He has a new book out, The Widows of Eastwick, a sequel to The Witches of Eastwick, the bestseller he published back in 1984. During this hour, Michael Krasny, one of the better interviewers out there, talks with Updike [...]
≡ Category: Literature, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ 1 Comment
Taken from a French television program, this vintage clip features Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) reading from Lolita and revealing his list of the most important novels of the 20th century, among other things. Nabokov speaks in English here. So don’t let the initial French throw you off. We’ve added this gem to our YouTube playlist.
Lolita, light [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ 2 Comments
The New York Times interviewed John Updike this past week and asked him how his most celebrated character, Rabbit Angstrom, would have voted. Here’s what Updike had to say.
On a related note, my program at Stanford will be offering an online writing course in partnership with The New York Times Book Review starting in January. [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ 4 Comments
A rather clever mini, mini-lecture from Charles Bernstein, poet and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wouldn’t you say?
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≡ Category: Literature, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Leave a Comment
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