A quick freebie mention: Amazon.com is currently giving away $3 worth of MP3’s until November 30th. That amounts essentially to three free songs. Just click to this page, follow a few easy steps (including using the code code MP34FREE), and you’ll be on your way.
The video above is the first of 26 lectures making up a free Yale course called The American Novel Since 1945. Taught by Amy Hungerford, the course introduces you to the novels of America’s finest post-war writers — Nabokov (émigré), Salinger, Kerouac, and Pynchon, and also Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Safran Foer. You can watch all lectures in the following formats: YouTube – iTunes Audio – iTunes Video. Yale also offers the files as mp3s/movs here. For more full-fledged courses from other top universities (including many others from Yale), visit our collection of Free Online Literature Courses, a subset of our collection 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
You can stream all of the lectures, from start to finish, below:
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With six published novels under his belt, you might think J.A. Konrath has it made. But, if you know much about the current publishing market, you could certainly question that. Made or not, JA made a very interesting discovery recently when he sat down and compared his Hyperion ebook royalty statements with the proceeds he’s brought in by putting up four novels on Amazon’s Kindle store all by himself.
What did he learn? That self-publishing ebooks can be a lucrative and very real option for known authors! You’ve got to read the whole post here to get a full sense of the figures involved and why this has been working for him.
While we’re at it, if you want more writers disclosing their royalty statements in blogs, have a look at what Lynn Viehl has to say about the proceeds from her NY Times Bestselling books at Genreality.com. Thanks to April Hamilton at Publetariat for bringing this to my eye.
Two weeks ago, we presented a list of 35 sites where you can watch free movies online. Now, we’ve taken the next step and added 100 high-quality films to our list. Some films are contemporary, but many are classics created by legendary directors, actors & actresses. And they’re frequently made available by the great Internet Archive. (Note: you can usually stream or download their films. It’s your choice.) Below I have listed 15 films, but you can find the complete list here. Finally, if you want to forward a short link to friends, here’s one that you can use: http://bit.ly/freeonlinemovies
Beat the Devil (1953) Directed by John Huston, with Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre.
Dementia 13 (1963) A horror film that was one of Francis Ford Coppola’s early mainstream efforts.
His Girl Friday (1940) Directed by Howard Hawks. A classic comedy with Cary Grant.
We take you back to 1967, to the three-day Monterey Pop Festival in California, which was kind of a precursor to the Woodstock Festival held in 1969. Monterey marked, among other things, the first major American appearances by Jimi Hendrix and The Who. Above, we give you Hendrix covering Bob Dylan’s anthem Like a Rolling Stone. And here, we have Wild Thing, which ends famously in Hendrix adding fire to his best imitation of Pete Townshend. Great vintage clips which you’ll find in our YouTube favorites.
Newly launched: The Shakespeare Quartos Archive is a new digital collection that features pre-1642 editions of William Shakespeare’s plays. Here, for example, you will find rare early editions of Hamlet, including all 32 existing quarto copies of the play in one place. An online first. Thanks Jeremy for the tip…
It happened 44 years ago. A 14-year-old Beatles fan named Jerry Levitan managed to sneak into John Lennon’s Toronto hotel room and asked for an interview. And he got one. Now, there’s a short animated film that brings that encounter back to life. I Met the Walrus was nominated for the 2008 Academy Award for Animated Short. You’ll know why when you watch it. Another excellent find by Vickie.
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