Two weeks ago, we gave a brief, passing mention to a gem of a clip — James Gandolfini reading from Maurice Sendak’s controversial children’s book In The Night Kitchen (1970). Given the unfortunate and untimely demise of the actor, it seems worth putting this video directly into the spotlight for a moment. Gandolfini’s reading took place on September 15, 2008 at the 92nd St Y in New York City, at a celebration held on the occasion of Maurice Sendak’s 80th birthday. A fan of Sendak’s great children’s tales, Gandolfini also performed the voice of Carol in the 2009 film adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are. Listen below.
Philip Roth announced his retirement from the writing life last fall, a few months shy of his 80th birthday. Now, on a computer in his New York City apartment, hangs a Post-It note that reads, “The struggle with writing is over.” There won’t be another novel. There won’t be a 29th.
Admirers of Philip Roth may have to settle for the occasional odd publication, like the eulogy Roth published in the New York Times in April, when his high school teacher and long-time friend passed away. His name was Bob Lowenstein. He taught at Weequahic High School in Newark, New Jersey, and Roth came to know him like this:
Bob was my homeroom teacher. This meant that I saw him first thing in the morning, every single day of the school year. I was never to take a language course with him — I had Mademoiselle Glucksman for French and Señorita Baleroso for Spanish — but I didn’t forget him. Who at Weequahic did? Consequently, when it came his turn to be mauled in Congress’s anti-Communist crusade of the 1940s and 1950s, I followed his fate as best I could in the stories that I had my parents clip from the Newark newspapers and mail to me.
I don’t remember how we came together again around 1990, about 40 years after I’d graduated Weequahic High. I was back in America from having lived largely abroad for some 12 years, and either I wrote to him about something or he wrote to me about something and we met for lunch at Zelda and his house in West Orange. In the spirit of Bob Lowenstein, I will put the matter in plain language, directly as I can: I believe we fell in love with each other.
In recent weeks, Roth visited the headquarters of Audible.com — also based in Newark, New Jersey — and recorded an audio version of his tribute. You can download it for free at Audible (or hear an excerpt below), and, for every download, Audible will donate $1 to the Newark Public Library, capping at $25,000. The download requires registering with Audible.
Separately, if you want to download a novel by Philip Roth, you can always head over to Audible.com and register for a 30-day free trial. You can download any audiobook for free. Then, when the trial is over, you can continue your Audible subscription (as I do — I love the service), or cancel it, and still keep the audio book. And, by the way, whenever someone signs up for a free trial, it helps support Open Culture. Also find more great reads in our collection of Free Audio Books.
When we think of Kurt Vonnegut, we tend to think of Slaughterhouse-Five. Maybe we also think of the short story “Harrison Bergeron,” which gets assigned in class by slightly alternative-minded English teachers. Now that I think about it, I realize that those two works of Vonnegut’s have both become movies: George Roy Hill’s Slaughterhouse-Five hit theaters in 1972, and Bruce Pittman’s Harrison Bergeron debuted on Showtime in 1995. But the belovedly cynical writer produced fourteen novels, eight story collections, and five books of essays, and even if we just explore further into those adapted for the screen, we find a perhaps under-discussed piece of Vonnegutia: Breakfast of Champions, his 1973 follow-up to Slaughterhouse-Five.
The novel examines Dwayne Hoover, a deeply troubled Pontiac salesman obsessed with the writings of pulp sci-fi author Kilgore Trout. You may remember Trout from his role in Vonnegut’s previous book, whose “unstuck-in-time” protagonist Billy Pilgrim he invites to his wedding anniversary. Breakfast of Champions sets Trout on a collision course with Hoover in the fictional American town of Midland City, bringing in a great variety of characters, themes, and elements from Vonnegut’s other work in so doing. In the clip above, you can hear the author’s very first public reading of the book, recorded on May 4, 1970 at New York’s 92nd Street Y. After it became available to readers three years later, Breakfast of Champions would become a favorite among the Vonnegut faithful. The 1999 Bruce Willis-starring film adaptation… less so.
How’s that New Year’s resolution going? You know, the one where you promised to make better use of your free time and learn new things? If you’re off track, fear not. It’s only April. It’s not too late to make good on your promise. And we can help. Below, we’ll tell you how to fill your Kindle, iPad, computer, smartphone, computer, etc. with free intelligent media — great ebooks and audio books, movies, courses, and the rest:
Free eBooks: You have always wanted to read the great works. And now is your chance. When you dive into our Free eBooks collection you will find 400 great works by some classic writers (Dickens, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare and Tolstoy) and contemporary writers (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, and Kurt Vonnegut). The collection also gives you access to the 51-volume Harvard Classics.
If you’re an iPad/iPhone user, the download process is super easy. Just click the “iPad/iPhone” links and you’re good to go. Kindle and Nook users will generally want to click the “Kindle + Other Formats links” to download ebook files, but we’d suggest watching these instructional videos (Kindle –Nook) beforehand.
Free Audio Books: What better way to spend your free time than listening to some of the greatest books ever written? This page contains a vast number of free audio books, including works by Arthur Conan Doyle, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, George Orwell and more recent writers — Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Carver, etc. You can download these classic books straight to your gagdets, then listen as you go.
[Note: If you’re looking for a contemporary book, you can download one free audio book from Audible.com. Find details on Audible’s no-strings-attached deal here.]
Free Online Courses: This list brings together over 700 free online courses from leading universities, including Stanford, Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, Oxford and beyond. These full-fledged courses range across all disciplines – history, physics, philosophy, psychology and beyond. Most all of these courses are available in audio, and roughly 75% are available in video. You can’t receive credits or certificates for these courses (click here for courses that do offer certificates). But the amount of personal enrichment you will derive is immeasurable.
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Free Language Lessons: Perhaps learning a new language is one of your resolutions. Well, here is a great way to do it. Take your pick of 40 languages — Spanish, French, Italian, Mandarin, English, Russian, Dutch, even Finnish, Yiddish and Esperanto. These lessons are all free and ready to download.
Free Textbooks: And one last item for the lifelong learners among you. We have scoured the web and pulled together a list of 150 Free Textbooks. It’s a great resource particularly if you’re looking to learn math, computer science or physics on your own. There might be a diamond in the rough here for you.
Woody Guthrie may have written as many as 3,000 folk songs, but he didn’t limit himself there. He also managed to write a novel called House of Earth, which only last month saw the light of day. To whom do we owe the pleasure of reading this previously unknown addendum to the prolific singer-songwriter’s career? Why, to historian Douglas Brinkley, actor Johnny Depp, and Guthrie’s daughter Nora. Researching a forthcoming biography of Bob Dylan, Brinkley spotted a mention of House of Earthsomewhere deep in the files of famous folk-music recordist Alan Lomax. He traced the manuscript to the University of Tulsa library, which had it in storage. Depp had recently started his own publishing imprint, Infinitum Nihil, and Brinkley passed along this promising piece of material. (The two had known each other for years, having initially met through that great literary connector, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.)
With House of Earth, Guthrie wrote a Dust Bowl novel, but one very much in tune with his own sensibilities. Unlike John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Guthrie’s story follows not the farm families who fled west, but those who remained on the Texas plains. “Pitched somewhere between rural realism and proletarian protest,” write Brinkley and Depp in a New York Times Book Review essay, “somewhat static in terms of narrative drive, ‘House of Earth’ nonetheless offers a searing portrait of the Panhandle and its marginalized Great Depression residents. Guthrie successfully mixes Steinbeck’s narrative verve with D. H. Lawrence’s openness to erotic exploration.” As of this week, you can read and also now hear the book, as read by Will Patton, in an audio version released by Audible.com. (Find info on how to get it for free below.) At the top of this post, you’ll find a short clip of Patton delivering the singer’s prose. Though Guthrie will remain best known for his politically-charged songs, his novel, which launches broadsides against big finance, big lumber, and big agriculture, should carry charge enough for any of his enthusiasts.
Note: Do you want to download House of Earth from Audible for free? Here’s one way to do it. Just head over to Audible.com and register for a 30-day free trial. You can download any audio book for free. Then, when the trial is over, you can continue your Audible subscription, or cancel it, and still keep the audio book. The choice is yours. And, in full disclosure, let me tell you that we have a nice arrangement with Audible. Whenever someone signs up for a free trial, it helps support Open Culture. That’s cool. But frankly, we work with them because I personally use the service nothing short of religiously.
In an article originally published in book collector’s journal Firsts Magazine, bookseller James M. Dourgarian includes a set of records called “The Columbia Literary Series” (1953) as an essential part of the “completist’s Steinbeck collection.” Dourgarian describes the set, valued at $1,500 in 2007 thus:
The Columbia Literary Series is a great item, a set of 12 12-inch records with a variety of authors reading selections from their works. It was issued in an educational edition with a double sliding case, and a deluxe edition housed in a black leather attaché case with snaps. Both issues included a booklet about the making of the series, which was edited by Goddard Lieberson. The Steinbeck record has the author himself reading two of his most famous short stories, “The Snake” and “Johnny Bear.” Other authors in the series are William Saroyan, the three Sitwells, John Collier, Edna Ferber, Truman Capote, W. Somerset Maugham, Christopher Isherwood, Katherine Anne Porter and Aldous Huxley.
You can hear Steinbeck’s A‑side contribution to this illustrious series below, where he reads “The Snake,” a story he says “isn’t a story at all. It’s just something that happened.” Also in his brief introduction, the author describes his favorite piece of fan mail ever, from a small-town librarian who wrote that “The Snake” was “the worst story she had ever read anywhere. She was quite upset at its badness.”
On the B‑side, above, Steinbeck reads “Johnny Bear,” a story about “a monster,” who “really lived in central California.”
Looking for free, professionally-read audio books from Audible.com? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free trial with Audible.com, you can download two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here.
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