The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
A quick heads up for book lovers: Goodreads is a large social network for readers, with over 3,000,000 members who review, recommend and swap books. The site also features “book-give-aways” for its members. This month you can enter to win a free copy of If You Follow Me, a novel by Malena Watrous, a talented colleague [...]
≡ Category: Life, Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
For the 13th time, Chinese authorities arrested the well-known Chinese writer Liao Yiwu (The Corpse Walker) as he boarded a plane to attend a literary festival in Cologne, Germany. He has now been placed under house arrest. You can learn more about it here. (Also read Philip Gourevitch’s blog post for The New Yorker.) Please join this newly [...]
≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ 2 Comments
A good soul has pulled together a series of audio recordings by David Foster Wallace, the author of Infinite Jest, the sprawling 1100 page novel that now sits on TIME Magazine’s list of the best 100 novels ever. The audio collection (find here) is broken down into the following categories:
Interviews & Profiles
Readings
Eulogies & Remembrances
‘Brief Interviews’ Staged Readings
via [...]
≡ Category: Books, Film, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
(NOTE: some strong language here…)
Back in 1975, filmmaker Tom Schiller (only 20 years old at the time) made a short documentary on the novelist Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn). In the scene above, Miller, then 81 years old, reminisces about his difficult early life in New York, and it all takes place on the [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
The Guardian asked twenty nine writers to give their 10 Rules for Writing Fiction. Those given by Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections) were arguably the pithiest, and we list them below. The full lineup of writers (including Elmore Leonard, Margaret Atwood, and Richard Ford) can be found here. (The New Yorker has since followed up with [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Books, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
Note: You should be able to download Safran Foer’s new book for free (in audio format) through Audible.com’s no strings attached offer. Details here.
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≡ Category: Google, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
For three years, English teacher Jerome Burg has been using Google Earth to teach literature. Each “Lit Trip” involves mapping the movements of characters over a plot’s timeline and providing excerpts, pictures, and links at each location. I found a lit trip for one of my favorite novels, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which involves a lot of movement across [...]
≡ Category: Literature, Television | ≅ 1 Comment
What’s My Line? aired on CBS from 1950 to 1967, making it the longest-running game show in American television history. During its eighteen seasons, the show featured hundreds of celebrities, including some of America’s leading cultural figures. The clip above dusts off the 1960 appearance made by Carl Sandburg, the poet, writer, and three time [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
The University of South Carolina hosts a few gems, including F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby) reading lines from Shakespeare’s Othello. Or, more specifically, Othello’s oration to Venetian senators.
You can access the sound file in two formats here (aiff) and here (real audio).
This comes to us via Mike. Thanks to all who started sending good [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
Listen up. The clip above features the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice. It comes from a 1937 BBC radio broadcast. The talk, entitled “Craftsmanship,” was part of a series called “Words Fail Me.” You can find a transcript of the recorded portion here. Thanks Kirstin for helping get this nugget out there.
via mhpbooks
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≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
Following J.D. Salinger’s death last week, The New York Times has created an interactive map that retraces the footsteps of Salinger’s most famous character, Holden Caulfield. The Times introduces the map as follows:
Trace Holden Caulfield’s perambulations around Manhattan in “The Catcher in the Rye” to places like the Edmont Hotel, where Holden had an awkward [...]
≡ Category: Books, Life, Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
More sad news. J.D. Salinger, who brought us The Catcher in the Rye, has died at 91. Here’s the initial news release.
Boy, when you’re dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in [...]
≡ Category: Literature, Television | ≅ 2 Comments
Rod Serling, the American screenwriter & television producer best known for The Twilight Zone (watch full episodes here), fielded questions from students about the whole art of writing for television. In the clip above, he gives a rather dramatic response to the question, “Where do ideas come from?” (They come from the Earth… They’re in [...]
≡ Category: Film, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
Take the Coen Brothers’ 1998 cult film, The Big Lebowski, and put it in Shakespearean verse, and what do you get? Two Gentlemen of Lebowski as written by Adam Bertocci. It begins:
In wayfarer’s worlds out west was once a man,
A man I come not to bury, but to praise.
His name was Geoffrey Lebowski called, yet
Not [...]
≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
This almost slipped by me. As 2009 drew to a close, The New York Times posted two annual lists. First, its list of 100 Notable Books and then its 10 Best Books of 2009. 5 Fiction. 5 Nonfiction. It’s a pretty good distillation of the better works published last year. But enough about ‘09. What’s coming [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
The world according to John Irving. Times are tougher for young writers. But the book isn’t going away. You can watch the full interview with Irving here.
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≡ Category: Amazon Kindle, Literature, Most Popular, e-books, iPhone | ≅ 1 Comment
Today, we’re rolling out a sizable collection of Free eBooks, most of them classics, that features major works written by James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Nietzsche and others. (We have even thrown in a little Paulo Coelho.) You’ll find 100+ free ebooks in total, and you can download the texts to your computer, smart phone (iPhone, [...]
≡ Category: Amazon Kindle, Audio Books, Books, Literature | ≅ 4 Comments
Today’s free story: When They Were Calling You in for Dinner (listen here) or read it in the Charles River Review [To download the story and listen on your MP3 player, just right-click and "save file as..."]
Dear OC readers,
About a week ago, I posted here about my Publishing Experiment Take 1. I spoke of the need [...]
≡ Category: Amazon Kindle, Books, Literature, e-books | ≅ 7 Comments
Those who read this blog regularly may remember my past posts (here, here and here) about the Amazon Kindle and recall that I have mixed feelings about it. You’ll also know that I’ve been interested in what authors such as J.A. Konrath have accomplished by releasing books on the Kindle itself. (Heck, some of you even [...]
≡ Category: Books, Literature, e-books | ≅ Leave a Comment
This holiday season, I’m happy to have teamed up with eleven fabulous authors in offering a holiday sampler just for book lovers! Here you’ll find excerpts of a dozen new novels and nonfiction books by these New York Times bestselling authors, successful entrepreneurs, and talented storytellers. The excerpts can all be found in this nice PDF. [...]
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