There will be a day — maybe it’s already here; maybe it was always here — when the Kindle will look incredibly retro. Mike Matas, once a designer of user interfaces at Apple and now co-founder of Push Pop Press, may make that day of visual reckoning come sooner rather than later. The demo above (which is easily worth a thousand words) lets you peer into the near future.. Text, images, audio, video and interactive graphics — they’ll come together in a seamless reading experience, making the traditional ebook look entirely one dimensional. You can download the book on display, Al Gore’s “Our Choice,” on iTunes here.
World Literature in 13 Parts: From Gilgamesh to García Márquez
Love and longing, hope and fear — these threads run throughout all literature, whether we’re talking about the great ancient epics, or contemporary novels written in the East or the West. That’s the main premise of Invitation to World Literature, a multimedia program organized by David Damrosch (Harvard University), and made with the backing of WGBH and Annenberg Media.
The program features 13 half-hour videos, which move from The Epic of Gilgamesh (circa 2500 BCE) through García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). And, collectively, these videos highlight over 100+ writers, scholars, artists, and performers with a personal connection to world literature. Philip Glass, Francine Prose, Harold Ramis, Robert Thurman, Kwame Anthony Appiah — they all make an appearance.
Each video is accompanied by readings and related materials. You can get started with Invitation to World Literature here, or find a trailer introducing the series here.
This course will be added to our list of Free Online Literature Courses, a subset of our collection 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
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William F. Buckley Explains How He Flogged Himself to Get Through Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged
Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged sold an estimated 25 million copies between its publication in 1957 and 2007. Early on, the book inspired a young generation of business leaders, and now, decades later, it holds appeal for a new class of conservatives. But it wasn’t always that way. Back in the 1950s, William F. Buckley, the enfant terrible of the conservative movement, launched the National Review and published a review by Whittaker Chambers — the Soviet spy who famously turned against Communism (and Alger Hiss), all while building a remarkable career at TIME Magazine. About Atlas Shrugged, Chambers wrote: ”I find it a remarkably silly book. It is certainly a bumptious one. Its story is preposterous.” And, what’s more, he adds: “Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.”
Rand never forgave Buckley for the review. Persona non grata, he was. Years later, in 2003, Buckley revisited the whole affair with Charlie Rose and made known his personal feelings for Rand’s book. “I had to flog myself to read it…”
Note: You can download Atlas Shrugged as a free audiobook if you sign up for a free 30-Day Trial with Audible.com. Find more information on that program here.
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Wealthy Donors Paying Universities to Teach Rand
via Roger Ebert
Seth Godin: The Wealth of Free (Semi-Animated)
Every idea has to begin somewhere. And, back in 2000, Seth Godin started experimenting with a fairly radical publishing model. Inspired by Malcolm Gladwell, Godin wrote Unleashing the Ideavirus, which essentially argued that free ideas spread quicker than ideas that cost money. And it’s the ideas that spread the quickest that win. So what was the logical next step? Making the book available for free (get the ebook here) and seeing what happened.
The video above tells you the rest of the story. What it doesn’t tell you is that Godin has since written a steady stream of bestsellers (find free ecopies here), while authoring the most widely-read marketing blog and founding Squidoo. The artwork accompanying Godin’s talk was created by Stuart Langfield.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
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Vladimir Nabokov Marvels Over Different “Lolita” Book Covers
In this short excerpt from a TV program called “USA: The Novel,” Vladimir Nabokov comments on different foreign editions of his novel Lolita. The individual covers he discusses are listed here; the full program is available here, and it contains some memorable quotes by the author (from chapter 1: “Mr Nabokov, would you tell us why it is that you detest Dr. Freud?” — “I think he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. I don’t have the dreams that he discusses in his books, I don’t see umbrellas in my dreams or balloons.”).
Finding a publisher for Lolita proved to be rather difficult for Nabokov. A December 1953 review of the manuscript said: “It is overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian. To the public, it will be revolting. It will not sell, and will do immeasurable harm to a growing reputation. […] I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.” (Get more information at Stanford’s “The Book Haven”) Lolita was first published in 1955 (original cover here) and has since been translated into many languages with a wide variety of cover designs (find a good collection at this site).
Shortly after Lolita’s publication, Nabokov discussed his novel on the CBC program “Close Up”: see part one and part two.
Bonus: Little known detail — Nabokov held the post of curator of lepidoptera at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. He collected many butterflies and developed a theory of butterfly migration which disputed all previous theories and wasn’t taken seriously by biologists then. Only recently did genetic studies vindicate his once bold theory. Some of Nabokov’s beautiful drawings of the butterflies he studied can be enjoyed courtesy of Flavorwire.
You can find this video housed in our collection of 235 Cultural Icons.
By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
Tina Fey Brings Bossypants Tour to Google
A day after President Obama conducted his much publicized town hall meeting at Facebook, Tina Fey, the star of 30 Rock and the author of the new book Bossypants, headed to Google, just a few miles down the road.
Last May, Googlers had their riotous romp with Conan O’Brien. Now they get their 60 minutes with another comedian who came of age on NBC. The conversation led by Eric Schmidt teaches you the secrets of improv, how to take pictures like a model, the pros & cons of goofing on Sarah Palin, and why male and female comedy writers differ in fundamentally odd ways. Tina Fey is funny. But sometimes funnier is watching Schmidt trying to keep the conversation from going off the rails. Scroll to the 8:20 mark, and you’ll see what I mean.
Just an fyi: Tina Fey actually narrates the audiobook version of Bossypants, and you can snag it for free through this Audible.com deal. Details here.
The Pale King: How the Book Came Together (and How to Download the Novel in Audio)
When David Foster Wallace committed suicide in September 2008, he left behind the manuscript for The Pale King, an unfinished novel he started researching back in 1997, not long after the publication of Infinite Jest. The Pale King was finally published this past Friday (April 15), a date that was hardly arbitrary. Offering a lengthy meditation on boredom, The Pale King is set in a Midwestern I.R.S. office. And what was April 15th? The day when Americans traditionally file their taxes (although they have until the 18th this year).
The posthumous novel came together with the help of Wallace’s longtime editor, Michael Pietsch, who spent two years working through heaps of pages left in bins, drawers and wire baskets, hoping to turn this mass of material into the most complete novel possible. The interview with Pietsch above, along with this short piece in The New York Times, brings you inside the editing/making of The Pale King, which has already received some favorable reviews.
If you’re looking to get your hands on the book, give this some thought: If you register for a 14-day free trial with Audible.com, you can download pretty much any audio book in Audible’s catalogue for free. And that catalogue now includes The Pale King. Once the trial is over, you can continue your Audible subscription (as I did), or cancel it, and still keep the free book. The choice is yours…
The Shape of A Story: Writing Tips from Kurt Vonnegut
A few years ago, Open Culture readers listed Slaughterhouse Five as one of your top life-changing books. But Kurt Vonnegut was not only a great author. He was also an inspiration for anyone who aspires to write fiction – see for example his 8 rules for writing fiction, which starts with the so-obvious-it’s-often-forgotten reminder never to waste your reader’s time.
In this video, Vonnegut follows his own advice and sketches some brilliant blueprints for envisioning the “shape” of a story, all in less than 4 minutes and 37 seconds.
FYI. Original works by Vonnegut appear in Free Audio Books and Free eBooks collections.
Related Content:
Ray Bradbury Gives 12 Pieces of Writing Advice to Young Authors (2001)
John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspiring Writer and His Nobel Prize Speech
Writing Tips by Henry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
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