Novels — they’re in inevitable decline. They can’t compete with the movie screen, the TV screen and now the computer screen. Give things 25 years, and there will be just a small cult of readers left. That’s the prediction of American author, Philip Roth, who has 27 novels to his credit. And apparently, Roth is personally hastening the process. Earlier this year, he told a reporter for the Financial Times: “I’ve stopped reading fiction. I don’t read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don’t have the same interest in fiction that I once did.” When asked why, he quipped: “I don’t know. I wised up … ”
For Paul Auster, another productive novelist, the reports of the novel’s death are greatly exaggerated. Humans hunger for stories. They always will. And, the novel, it knows how to adapt and survive. Will it survive with the help of technology? Auster might not be the best person to ask. He owns neither a computer nor a mobile phone. Lucky man.
Bonus: You can listen to Paul Auster read The Red Notebook, a collection of short stories published in 2002, right here. (He starts reading at around the 8:30 mark.) We have it listed in our collection of Free Audio Books.
Time to resurrect another suddenly relevant item we first mentioned back in 2009…
Between 1968 and 1972, Stewart Brand published The Whole Earth Catalog. For Kevin Kelly, the Catalog was essentially “a paper-based database offering thousands of hacks, tips, tools, suggestions, and possibilities for optimizing your life.” For Steve Jobs, it was a “Bible” of his generation, a life ‑transforming publication. Speaking to Stanford graduates in 2005, in what Ken Auletta has called the “Gettysburg Address of graduation-speechism,” Jobs explained why he drew inspiration from this intellectual creation of the 60s counterculture:
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
The good news is that The Whole Earth Catalog and some related publications are available online. You can read them for free, or download them for a fee. We suggest diving in right here, in Fall 1968, where it all begins. Enjoy.…
We all know where books come from: a human and a muse meet, fall in love, and two months to twenty years later, a book is born. Then, as with other varieties of babies, the sleepless nights start as a writer searches for a home for the book, collecting rejections like badges of honor, testaments to determination.
Well, that was the old-fashioned way. We’ve all heard how the internet has leveled the playing field, allowing anybody to publish work and find an audience. However, this easier path to publication hasn’t necessarily solved an even older writer’s conundrum: How to pay for it.
That is, how to make enough money to sustain yourself as you write (day jobs aside). And so writers must become even wilier. Though you may make money from the sale of a book, how do you fund yourself before the book?
Seth Harwood, the author of three books, is at the front of the movement to find alternate and creative ways of not only reaching audiences, but pursuing the writing life. Since graduating from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 2002, Harwood has built up a loyal fan base—his “Palms Mamas and Palms Daddies” (named for one of his protagonists, Jack Palms)—through social media and free podcasting. Harwood is sustaining a writing life along a path that is likely to be more and more common for writers.
After offering his first novel, Jack Wakes Up, as a free audiobook, Harwood published it in paperback with Breakneck Books in 2008. The Amazon sales, pushed by Palms Mamas and Palms Daddies, landed the book in #1 in Crime/Mystery and #45 overall, bringing the attention of Random House, who re-published the book one year later.
Looking outside mainstream avenues, Harwood secured funding for publication of his next venture, Young Junius, with Tyrus Books by preselling signed copies through Paypal—before the books existed in physical form. And now he is one of the early adopters of using Kickstarter to pay for the gestation and birth of not one book—but five previously-written works in the next six months–as he puts it, “raising the fixed costs of bringing these books to the marketplace.” His Kickstarter campaign based around This Is Life, the sequel to Jack Wakes Up was—impressively—fully funded within 25 hours—and with a few days still left to go, it has exceeded the original goal by over $2000.
What can a writer offer besides an autographed copy of the to-be-written book, or a mention in the acknowledgements? For Harwood’s project, the pledges range from a dollar to $999, with thank-yous spanning from the aforementioned to—at the $999 end—an original novella written according to the donor’s wishes and published as a one-off hardcover.
Indeed, now more than ever, it seems essential for authors to meet readers at least half-way. Harwood considers himself an “author-preneur,” developing new business models as he publishes his books. As he sees it, innovation comes much more easily to an author acting alone, than to a large publishing company or big corporation. He aims for the new models as he sees them developing, knowing he’s got to go out and find readers himself. As Coelho declares, “The ivory tower does not exist anymore.”
This post was contributed by Shawna Yang Ryan. Her novel Water Ghosts was a finalist for the 2010 Asian American Literary Award. In 2012, she will be the Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.
Late last week, Stephen King treated an audience at George Mason University to a 10-minute reading from his upcoming book Dr. Sleep . It’s not just any other book. It’s the sequel to The Shining, his 1977 thriller that Stanley Kubrick fammously adapted to film. (Don’t miss Making the Shining here.)
King first started talking about a sequel in 2009, and now we’re getting our first taste of what’s to come. At long last, you will know what happened to Danny Torrance.
John Hodgman, your favorite quirky, mustachioed humorist, made an appearance at the Maker Faire festival in NYC earlier this month. And, in the DIY spirit of the event, he gave a 30+ minute comic riff on material appearing in his upcoming book That is All — a compendium of “complete world knowledge” that can help you survive an apocalypse. The better part of the talk focuses, quite naturally, on the magic of magic tricks — something we all need to know more about…
Get ready for it. This week, Knopf will release Paulo Coelho’s latest novel, Aleph. And we’re taking bets on three questions. How many copies will be legally sold? (The Alchemist has sold more than 65 million copies.) How many copies will be pirated and given away? And to what extent will the circulation of illegal copies actually benefit legit sales?
In recent years, Coelho has become something of a willing conspirator in the pirating of his own work. Sometimes he links on his own blog to pirated copies floating around the web. Other times he makes the texts available (in multiple languages) in a nice shareable widget.
Coelho explains how his adventures in self-pirating got underway in a Q&A appearing in yesterday’s New York Times.
Q. You’ve also had success distributing your work free. You’re famous for posting pirated version of your books online, a very unorthodox move for an author.
A. I saw the first pirated edition of one of my books, so I said I’m going to post it online. There was a difficult moment in Russia; they didn’t have much paper. I put this first copy online and I sold, in the first year, 10,000 copies there. And in the second year it jumped to 100,000 copies. So I said, “It is working.” Then I started putting other books online, knowing that if people read a little bit and they like it, they are going to buy the book. My sales were growing and growing, and one day I was at a high-tech conference, and I made it public.
Q. Weren’t you afraid of making your publisher angry?
A. I was afraid, of course. But it was too late. When I returned to my place, the first phone call was from my publisher in the U.S. She said, “We have a problem.”
Q. You’re referring to Jane Friedman, who was then the very powerful chief executive of HarperCollins?
A. Yes, Jane. She’s tough. So I got this call from her, and I said, “Jane, what do you want me to do?” So she said, let’s do it officially, deliberately. Thanks to her my life in the U.S. changed.
The rest of the interview continues here. And, in the meantime, you can find several Coelho books catalogued in our collection of Free eBooks.
Every year, thousands of American high school students read a common selection of great novels — classics loved by young and old readers alike. Today, we have selected 20 of the most popular books and highlighted ways that you can download versions for free, mostly as free audio books and ebooks, and sometimes as movies and radio dramas. You will find more great works — and sometimes other digital formats — in our twin collections: 600 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices and 550 Free Audio Books. So please give them a good look over, and if we’re missing a novel you want, don’t forget Audible.com’s 14 day trial. It will let you download an audio book for free, pretty much any one you want.
1984 by George Orwell: Read Online
Although published in 1949, 1984 still captures our imagination generations later because it offers one of the best literary accounts of totalitarianism ever published. And it’s simply a great read.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: eText — Free Radio Dramatization (by Huxley himself)
Little known fact. Huxley once taught George Orwell French at Eton. And, years later his 1931 classic, Brave New World, is often mentioned in the same breath with 1984 when it comes to great books that describe a dystopian future.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley - Free ebook — Free Audio Book (MP3) — Radio Drama version (1938) — Movie
Mary Shelley started writing the great monster novel when she was only 18 and completed it when she was 21. The 1823 gothic novel is arguably one of your first works of science fiction.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: Free eBook — Free Audio Book (iTunes) — Radio Dramatization by Orson Welles (MP3)
More than 100 years after its publication (1902), Conrad’s novella still offers the most canonical look at colonialism and imperialism. So powerful was its influence that Orson Welles dramatized it in 1938, and the book also famously inspired Coppola’s Apocalypse Now in 1979.
Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen – Free eBook — Free Audio Book (iTunes)
Jane Austen’s 1813 novel remains as popular as ever. To date, it has sold more than 20 million copies, and, every so often, it finds itself adapted to a new film, TV or theater production. A must read.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain — Free eBook — Free Audio Book (iTunes)
When you think Huckleberry Finn, you think Great American Novel. It was controversial when it was first published in 1884, and it remains so today. But nonetheless Twain’s classic is a perennial favorite for readers around the world.
The Call of the Wild by Jack London — Free eBook — Free Audio Book (iTunes) The Call of the Wild, first published in 1903, is regarded as Jack London’s masterpiece. It’s “a tale about unbreakable spirit and the fight for survival in the frozen Alaskan Klondike.”
The Crucible by Arthur Miller - Free Audio Book from Audible.com
Arthur Miller’s 1952 play used the Salem witch trials of 1692 and 1693 to offer a commentary on McCarthyism that tarnished America during the 1950s. Today, The Crucible occupies a central place in America’s literary canon.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck — Free Audio Book from Audible.com
This 1939 novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and later helped Steinbeck win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. It’s perhaps the most important book to give literary expression to the Great Depression.
The Odyssey by Homer – Free eBook — Free Audio Book
The Western literary tradition begins with Homer’s epic poems The Iliad (etext here) and The Odyssey, both written some 2800 years ago. It has been said that “if the Iliad is the world’s greatest war epic, then the Odyssey is literature’s grandest evocation of everyman’s journey through life.” And that just about gets to the heart of the poem.
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway - Free Audio Book from Audible.com
It was Hemingway’s last major work of fiction (1951) and certainly one of his most popular, bringing many readers into contact with Hemingway’s writing for the first time.
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane — Free eBook — Free Audio Book (iTunes) — Free Movie
This Civil War novel won what Joseph Conrad called “an orgy of praise” after its publication in 1895, and inspired Ernest Hemingway and the Modernists later. The novel made Stephen Crane a celebrity at the age of 24, though he died only five years later.
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne – Free eBooks – Free Audio Book — Movie
Though set in Puritan Boston between 1642 and 1649, Hawthorne’s magnum opus explores “the moral dilemmas of personal responsibility, and the consuming emotions of guilt, anger, loyalty and revenge” that were relevant in 1850 (when the book was published). And they remain so today.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee — Free Audio Book from Audible.com
Harper Lee’s 1960 novel takes an incisive look at attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South during the 1930s. It won the Pulitzer Prize a year later.
Note: We listed Audible.com as an option when books were still under copyright.
Meanwhile, educators don’t miss our collection of Free Courses. It features many free Literature courses, including courses on American literature.
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