If you ask Stephen King, he’ll tell you that H.P. Lovecraft was “the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.” And Joyce Carol Oates will readily admit that Lovecraft had “an incalculable influence on succeeding generations of writers of horror fiction.” In these modern times, you can revisit Lovecraft’s classic horror tales by downloading his works in text or audio. (See below.) Or, you can revisit his cosmic horror tales by picking up The Lovecraft Anthology, a new graphic novel series that brings Lovecraft’s writings to “vivid and malevolent life.” The video above gives you a preview of what the series has to offer. It features an animation of “The Call of Cthulhu,” Lovecraft’s famous pulp story from 1926.
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“David Foster Wallace’s writing sort of lends itself to being read aloud,” says actor Brian Elerding. He understates the case; at times, Wallace seems to have crafted his prose specifically to reflect and embody spoken language. He listened to the English actually used today, including all its tics, hitches, solecisms, and deliberate inarticulacies, with an observatory precision and rigor approaching the scientific. Actor-writer-director John Krasinski first put this quality of Wallace’s writing to a high-profile test with his 2009 film adaptation of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. In the above clip, we see the making of a similar project in a very different form: last April in Beverly Hills, the PEN (Poets, Essayists, and Novelists) Center USA put on a live reading where “eleven talented actors” performed David Foster Wallace monologues “to an enthusiastic crowd of 300.”
These monologues came adapted from The Pale King, Wallace’s famously posthumous novel about what, if anything, lays beyond the crushing veil of tedium at a Peoria IRS branch office. As we enter the throes of United States tax time, the book gears up for a paperback release featuring additional material, some of which appeared last month at The Millions. PEN’s reading, introduced by Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin, showcased interpretations of The Pale King’s characters through the voices of actors like Nick Offerman and Josh Radnor, comedians like Rob Delaney and June Diane Raphael, and even former Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins. Now best known as a spoken-word artist, Rollins understands well the power and depth of human speech. “It’s trying to reach you on every page,” he says of Wallace’s writing. “He’s trying to make a connection.” Struggling to pin down the exact nature of Wallace’s resonance, so strong with so many readers, literary scholars have used hundreds of thousands of their own words to draw the very same conclusion.
A couple weeks back, we mentioned that you can download a finely-read audio version of James Joyce’s Ulysses for free. What that version doesn’t include — and couldn’t include — are etchings by Henri Matisse. Back in the mid-1930s, George Macey, an American publisher, approached the celebrated painter and asked him how many etchings he could provide for $5,000. Although it’s widely believed that Matisse never read Joyce’s sprawling classic (despite being given a French translation of the text), he did come back with 26 full-page illustrations, all of them based on six themes from Homer’s Odyssey, the epic poem that Ulysses consciously plays upon. In 1935, an illustrated edition of Ulysses was printed. Matisse signed 1500 copies; Joyce only 250. And today a copy signed by both artists will run you a cool $37k. Buy, hey, the shipping is only $6.
If you’ve ever spent any time with old books, or stepped into the right used bookstore, you’ve encountered that distinctive smell. Produced by Abe’s Books, and drawing on research from chemists at University College, London, this video looks at the science behind the aroma of used books — at what happens when chemicals and organic matter confront heat, light, moisture and time.
When you’re done watching the video, you might want to spend time with a second clip that deals with another part of the lifecycle of the book — the birth of a book. Shot by Glen Milner at Smith-Settle Printers in Leeds, England, this short film lets you watch firsthand a book — Suzanne St Albans’ Mango and Mimosa — being made with old school printing methods. Enjoy.
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Like fellow genre icon Stephen King, Ray Bradbury has reached far beyond his established audience by offering writing advice to anyone who puts pen to paper. (Or keys to keyboard; “Use whatever works,” he often says.) In this 2001 keynote address at Point Loma Nazarene University’s Writer’s Symposium By the Sea, Bradbury tells stories from his writing life, all of which offer lessons on how to hone the craft. Most of these have to do with the day-in, day-out practices that make up what he calls “writing hygiene.” Watch this entertainingly digressive talk and you might pull out an entirely different set of points, but here, in list form, is how I interpret Bradbury’s program:
Don’t start out writing novels. They take too long. Begin your writing life instead by cranking out “a hell of a lot of short stories,” as many as one per week. Take a year to do it; he claims that it simply isn’t possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row. He waited until the age of 30 to write his first novel, Fahrenheit 451. “Worth waiting for, huh?”
You may love ’em, but you can’t be ’em. Bear that in mind when you inevitably attempt, consciously or unconsciously, to imitate your favorite writers, just as he imitated H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, and L. Frank Baum.
Examine “quality” short stories. He suggests Roald Dahl, Guy de Maupassant, and the lesser-known Nigel Kneale and John Collier. Anything in the New Yorker today doesn’t make his cut, since he finds that their stories have “no metaphor.”
Stuff your head. To accumulate the intellectual building blocks of these metaphors, he suggests a course of bedtime reading: one short story, one poem (but Pope, Shakespeare, and Frost, not modern “crap”), and one essay. These essays should come from a diversity of fields, including archaeology, zoology, biology, philosophy, politics, and literature. “At the end of a thousand nights,” so he sums it up, “Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff!”
Get rid of friends who don’t believe in you. Do they make fun of your writerly ambitions? He suggests calling them up to “fire them” without delay.
Live in the library. Don’t live in your “goddamn computers.” He may not have gone to college, but his insatiable reading habits allowed him to “graduate from the library” at age 28.
Fall in love with movies. Preferably old ones.
Write with joy. In his mind, “writing is not a serious business.” If a story starts to feel like work, scrap it and start one that doesn’t. “I want you to envy me my joy,” he tells his audience.
Don’t plan on making money. He and his wife, who “took a vow of poverty” to marry him, hit 37 before they could afford a car (and he still never got around to picking up a license).
List ten things you love, and ten things you hate. Then write about the former, and “kill” the later — also by writing about them. Do the same with your fears.
Just type any old thing that comes into your head. He recommends “word association” to break down any creative blockages, since “you don’t know what’s in you until you test it.”
Remember, with writing, what you’re looking for is just one person to come up and tell you, “I love you for what you do.” Or, failing that, you’re looking for someone to come up and tell you, “You’re not nuts like people say.”
The online bookseller Good Books donates 100 percent of its retail profit to Oxfam’s charity projects, which tells you the sense of moral “good” their name means to evoke. But what about the other sense, the sense of “good” you’d use when telling a friend about a thrilling literary experience? Good Books clearly have their own ideas about that as well, and if you’d call Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Metamorphosis “good books,” you’re of the same mind they are. Having commissioned a series of promotional videos on the theme of Great Writers, Good Books show us the kind of readers they are by beginning it with an intricately animated mash-up of the spirits of Franz Kafka and Hunter S. Thompson. Under a bucket hat, behind aviator sunglasses, and deep into an altered mental state, our narrator feels the sudden, urgent need for a copy of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Unwilling to make the purchase in “the great river of mediocrity,” he instead makes the buy from “a bunch of rose-tinted, willfully delusional Pollyannas giving away all the money they make — every guilt-ridden cent.”
The animation, created by a studio called Buck, should easily meet the aesthetic demands of any viewer in their own altered state or looking to get into one. Its ever-shifting shapes both chase and anticipate the words of the narrator’s looping, staggering monologue, complementing the eerily Thompsonian voice with wave after wave of troublingly Kafkan imagery (at least, whenever it settles into recognizable figures). Animation enthusiasts can learn more about the painstaking work that went into all of this in Motionographer’s interview with Buck’s creative directors. What, you wonder, was the hardest shot to animate? Probably the one “with the tethered goat and hundreds of beetles,” they reply. Some fret about the increasing intermingling between commercials and the stranger, more raw, less salable arts, but if this at all represents the future of advertisements, for charity stores or otherwise, I say bring on the goats and beetles alike. via The Atlantic
Today we’re bringing you a roundup of some of the great Science Fiction, Fantasy and Dystopian classics available on the web. And what better way to get started than with Aldous Huxley reading a dramatized recording of his 1932 novel, Brave New World. The reading aired on the CBS Radio Workshop in 1956. You can listen to Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
(FYI: You can download Huxley’s original work — as opposed to the dramatized version — in audio by signing up for a Free Trial with Audible.com, and that applies to other books mentioned here as well.)
Little known fact. Aldous Huxley once gave George Orwell French lessons at Eton. And, 17 years after the release of Brave New World, Huxley’s pupil published 1984. The seminal dystopian work may be one of the most influential novels of the 20th century, and it’s almost certainly the most important political novel from that period. You can find it available on the web in three formats: Free eText — Free Audio Book – Free Movie.
In 1910, J. Searle Dawley wrote and directed Frankenstein. It took him three days to shoot the 12-minute film (when most films were actually shot in just one day). It marked the first time that Mary Shelley’s classic monster tale (text — audio) was ever adapted to film. And, somewhat notably, Thomas Edison had a hand (albeit it an indirect one) in making the film. The first Frankenstein film was shot at Edison Studios, the production company owned by the famous inventor.
Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates — they both pay homage to H.P. Lovecraft and his great tales. And you can too by spending time with his collected works, available in etext formats here and audio formats here (Free Mp3 Zip File – Free Stream).
Philip K. Dick published 44 novels and 121 stories during his short lifetime, solidifying his position as one of America’s top sci-fi writers. If you’re not intimately familiar with his novels, then you almost certainly know major films based on Dick’s work – Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly and Minority Report. To get you acquainted with PKD’s writing, we have culled together 14 short stories for your enjoyment.
Back in the late 1930s, Orson Welles launched The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a radio program dedicated to bringing dramatic, theatrical productions to the American airwaves. The show had a fairly short run, lasting from 1938 to 1941. But it made its mark. During these few years, The Mercury Theatre aired The War of the Worlds, an episode narrated by Welles that led many Americans to believe their country was under Martian attack. The legendary production, perhaps the most famous ever aired on American radio, was based on H.G. Wells’ early sci-fi novel, and you can listen to the broadcast right here.
Between 1951 and 1953, Isaac Asimov published three books that formed the now famous Foundation Trilogy. Many considered it a masterwork in science fiction, and that view became official doctrine in 1966 when the trilogy received a special Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series, notably beating out Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Eventually, the BBC decided to adapt Asimov’s trilogy to the radio, dramatizing the series in eight one-hour episodes that aired between May and June 1973. Thanks to The Internet Archive you can download the full program as a zip file, or stream it online:
Part 1 |MP3| Part 2 |MP3| Part 3 |MP3| Part 4 |MP3| Part 5 |MP3| Part 6 |MP3| Part 7 |MP3| Part 8 |MP3|
Before the days of Harry Potter, generations of young readers let their imaginations take flight with The Chronicles of Narnia, a series of seven fantasy novels written by C. S. Lewis. Like his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis served on the English faculty at Oxford University and took part in the Inklings, an Oxford literary group dedicated to fiction and fantasy. Published between 1950 and 1956, The Chronicles of Narnia has sold over 100 million copies in 47 languages, delighting younger and older readers worldwide.
Now, with the apparent blessing of the C.S. Lewis estate, the seven volume series is available in a free audio format. There are 101 audio recordings in total, each averaging 30 minutes and read by Chrissi Hart. Download the complete audio via the web or RSS Feed.
Neil Gaiman has emerged as one of today’s best fantasy writers. He has made comics respectable and published novels, including one that will be adapted by HBO. A great deal of his output, though, has been in the form of short stories, some available on the web in text format, others in audio.
The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains – Read Online
Between 1982 and 2000, Rudy Rucker wrote a series of four sci-fi novels that formed The Ware Tetralogy. The first two books in the series – Software and Wetware – won the Philip K. Dick Award for best novel. And William Gibson has called Rucker “a natural-born American street surrealist” or, more simply, one sui generis dude. And now the even better part: Rucker (who happens to be the great-great-great-grandson of Hegel) has released The Ware Tetralogy under a Creative Commons license, and you can download the full text for free in PDF and RTF formats. In total, the collection runs 800+ pages.
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