Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was originally published as a three-part serial story in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899, then later as a novella in the 1902 collection Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories. A complex and controversial “meditation on colonialism, evil, and the thin line between civilization and barbarity,” Heart of Darkness gained literary stature during the 1950s and 1960s, before peaking in the late 1970s–precisely around when Francis Ford Coppola released Apocalypse Now, a film loosely based on Conrad’s tale. What halted the novella’s momentum was a stinging rebuke from Chinua Achebe, father of modern African literature, who criticized the way it “projects the image of Africa as ‘the other world,’ the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization…”
Despite the controversies surrounding the text, Heart of Darkness remains widely read in American high schools and universities. And, notes Harold Bloom, it has “had a striking influence on writers, artists, and thinkers from all over the globe.” Below, you can listen to a reading of Heart of Darkness by British stage and voice actor Hayward Morse. It’s free on Spotify and will be added to our list, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free. In November, Kenneth Branagh will release his own version–which you can download for free if you join Audible.com’s 30 free trial program. Other free readings of Conrad’s novella can be found on Librivox.
Here’s a little known tip. If you open Spotify, click “Browse” (in the left hand nav), then scroll way down to “Word,” you will find a number of free audiobook collections–readings by Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, and Dylan Thomas; old time crime and sci-fi dramas; a big H.P. Lovecraft compendium and more. But that way of navigating things really only scratches the surface of what Spotify has to offer.
Vonnegut, Kurt – Slaughterhouse 5, Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, Welcome to the Monkey House (Abridged readings by Vonnegut) – Spotify
Welles, Orson — 61 Hours of Orson Welles’ Classic 1930s Radio Plays: War of the Worlds, Heart of Darkness & More — Spotify
Wells, HG – The War of the Worlds (Read by Maxwell Caulfield) – Spotify
Wilde, Oscar – The Importance of Being Earnest (Performed by John Gielgud) – Free
Yeats, William Butler – William Butler Reads His Own Work – Spotify
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.
Here’s an audio collection worth sharing with the cinephiles among you. Alfred Hitchcock Interviews (embedded below) brings together 12 interviews recorded over several decades, collectively running five hours and four minutes. If you need Spotify’s software, download it here. Then tune into Track 3 and hear Hitchcock describe his three theories of film editing. Track 10 lets you listen to his 33-minute “Masters of Cinema” interview recorded in 1972. And Track 12 presents a 96-minute “Master Class” on filmmaking. This audio collection will be housed in our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.
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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.
When we hear the opening of Also Sprach Zarathustra, we instinctively steel ourselves for enormous leaps through space and time. We have since 1968, when Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey made Richard Strauss’ 1896 piece its theme music. (Kubrick, as we posted in 2014, did commission an original score, only to reject it as “completely inadequate for the film.”) If you saw and loved it during its original theatrical run, long before the advent of home video, you had only a limited set of ways to re-live it at will. The obvious choice included buying a copy of the soundtrack or Arthur C. Clarke’s eponymous novel (or, for the kids, to go eat at Howard Johnson’s), but in 1976, you could also buy a record that gave you a bit of both at once.
On this now out-of-print record, Clarke reads the final chapters of 2001 with the accompaniment of that most recognizable piece from the film score, all packaged in a sleeve featuring an image of Keir Dullea as Mission Commander David Bowman on one of the film’s immaculately crafted space-station sets. You can hear side one at the top, and side two below.
If all this strikes you as an unconscionable intermingling of book and movie, remember that Kubrick’s 2001 doesn’t straightforwardly adapt Clarke’s 2001. Both of those independent but complementary works grew from the seed of “The Sentinel,” Clarke’s 1948 short story about a dazzling and mystifying artifact left behind by an ancient alien civilization. Kubrick had originally tapped Clarke to write a whole new screenplay, but that collaboration ultimately turned into two parallel projects, with the novelist writing to his own sensibility and the filmmaker certainly directing to his. Some Clarke fans prefer the novel and some Kubrick fans prefer the film, but those who admire the virtues of both 2001s will appreciate the existence of this record, in its own way an impressive artifact of a distant era.
Is your family hot and cranky? Crammed together in a car for the long ride home? Has boredom set in, despite the thousands of Pokémon still at large?
Uncle Shelby himself kicks things off with an invitation to all dreamers, wishers, liars, hopers, pray-ers, magic-bean-buyers, and pretenders.
That net seems sufficiently wide to encompass just about everyone, even (especially!) the sullen teen who wasn’t allowed to stay home by him or herself.
Silverstein did not subscribe to the dry narrative style that E.B.White used to such great effect on the audiobook of Charlotte’s Web.
Instead, he cracks himself up, hissing, yipping and howling his way through Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic. A veteran of Off-Broadway and the author of over a hundred one-act plays, Silverstein clearly relished performing his own work.
(As evidence, we submit “Warning,” an instructional poem concerning the sharp-toothed snail dwelling inside every human nose.)
My only regret is the absence of my personal favorite Silverstein poem …it seems unlikely that such a track exists, but I do love imagining the havoc it could wreak in the family car. Children, don’t forget your eggs.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her latest script, Fawnbook, is available in a digital edition from Indie Theater Now. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
We all have a mental image of Albert Einstein. For some of us, that mental image doesn’t get much more detailed than the mustache, the unruly hair, and the rumpled dress, all of which, thanks to his achievements in theoretical physics, have become visual signifiers of forbidding intelligence. But when we imagine this image of Einstein actually speaking, what does he sound like? Beyond guessing at a reasonably suitable Germanic accent, many of us will realize that we’ve never actually heard the man who came up with the Theory of Relativity speak.
Einstein left behind plenty of writing in addition to that piece, but often, to really understand how a mind works, you need to hear its owner talk. (And few minds, or in any case brains, have drawn as much attention as Einstein’s.) “I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university,” he once said, presumably including the sorts of audiences he spoke to in these recordings. Having heard Albert Einstein in His Own Voice, you’ll understand much more fully the intellectual interest to which Einstein, when not sticking it out in order to become the world’s dorm-room icon of wacky genius, could put the use of his tongue.
H.P. Lovecraft has somewhat fallen out of favor in many circles of horror and fantasy writing. Just this past year, after much debate, the World Fantasy Awards decided to remove his likeness from their statuette. Because, quite frankly, Lovecraft was not only a bigot but a committed anti-Semite and white supremacist who loathed virtually everyone who wasn’t, as he put it, “Nordic-American.” This included African-Americans and “stunted bracycephalic South-Italians & rat-faced half-Mongoloid Russian & Polish Jews, & all that cursed scum,” as he wrote in a letter to fellow writer August Derleth. The statement is representative of many, many more on the subject.
Were these simply private political opinions and nothing more, there might not be sufficient reason to read them into his work, but as several people have argued convincingly, Lovecraft’s opinions form the basis of so much of his work. China Miéville, for example, writes “I follow [French novelist Michel Houellebecq—hardly known for any kind of political correctness] in thinking that Lovecraft’s oeuvre, his work itself, is inspired by and deeply structured with race hatred. As Houellebecq said, it is racism itself that raises in Lovecraft a ‘poetic trance.’”
Lovecraft’s xenophobic loathing begins to seem like an almost pathological hatred and fear of anyone different, and of any kind of change in the nation’s makeup. It goes far beyond casual “man of his time” attitudes (and increasingly, of our time). F. Scott Fitzgerald lived during Lovecraft’s time. And Fitzgerald had the critical distance to satirize fanatical bigotry like Lovecraft’s in The Great Gatsby’s Tom Buchanan. All of that said, however, it’s impossible to deny Lovecraft’s influence on horror and fantasy, and almost no one has done so, even among those writers who most vehemently lobbied to retire his image or who found his presence deeply troubling.
World Fantasy Award winner Nnedi Okorafor writes about contemporary authors having to wrestle with the fact “that many of The Elders we honor and need to learn from hate or hated us.” Winner Sofia Samatar, who wanted the statuette changed, exclaimed, “I am not telling anybody not to read Lovecraft. I teach Lovecraft! I actually insist that people read him and write about him!” In a short essay at Tor, sci-fi and fantasy writer Elizabeth Bear expressed many of the same ambivalent feelings about her “complicated relationship with Lovecraft.” While finding his “bigotry of just about any stripe you like… revolting,” his work has nonetheless provided “a powerful source of inspiration, the foundations of it like Hadrian’s Wall; full of material for mining and repurposing.”
It’s not particularly unusual to find such ambivalent attitudes expressed toward literary ancestors. All artists—all people—have their character flaws, and to expect every writer we like to share our values seems naive, narrow, and superficial. But Lovecraft presents an extreme example, and also one whose prose is often pretty terrible: overstuffed, overwrought, pretentious, and archaic. But it’s that pulpy style that makes Lovecraft, Lovecraft—that contributes to the feverish atmosphere of paranoia and alienation in his stories. “He’s a master of mood,” Bear avows, “of sweeping blasted vistas of despair and the bone-soaking cold of space.”
That much of his despair and horror emanated from a place inside him that feared the “gestures & jabbering” of other humans does not make it any less effectively creepy or hypnotic. It just makes it that much harder to love Lovecraft the author, no matter how much we might admire his work. But perhaps Lovecraft was such an effective horror writer precisely because he was so terribly afraid of change and difference. As he himself wrote of his particular brand of supernatural horror, or “weird fiction,” as he called it: “horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected… because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion.” One needn’t be a phobic racist to write good horror fiction, but in Lovecraft’s case, I guess, it seems to have helped.
Just as much as the work of Isaac Asimov, or Robert Heinlein, or Gene Roddenberry resides in the DNA of science fiction, so too does Lovecraft inhabit the organic building blocks of horror writing. Horror and fantasy writers who somehow avoid reading Lovecraft may end up absorbing his influence anyway; readers who avoid him will end up reading some version of “Lovecraft pastiche,” as Bear puts it. So it behooves us to go to the source, find out what Lovecraft himself wrote, take the good over the bad, even “pick a fight with him,” writes Bear, “because of what he does right, that makes his stories too compelling to just walk away from, and because of what he does wrong… for example, the way he treats people as things.”
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