Talking Literature with Great British Novelists

woolf joyce

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

For decades, the BBC has inter­viewed leg­endary British nov­el­ists, ask­ing them how they cre­ate their mem­o­rable char­ac­ters, paint their evoca­tive set­tings with words, and devel­op plots that keep us turn­ing pages. Now, these audio inter­views appear online in a col­lec­tion called In Their  Own Words. The archive takes you back to 1937, to a con­ver­sa­tion with Vir­ginia Woolf, then moves you for­ward to inter­views with Aldous Hux­ley, JRR Tolkien, Doris Less­ing, Mar­tin Amis, VS Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie, to name just a few. These record­ings sit nice­ly along­side a giant archive of lit­er­ary inter­views recent­ly pub­lished online by The Paris Review. (More on that here.) So, if you want to get into the “how” of lit­er­a­ture, you can now tap instant­ly into the col­lec­tive wis­dom of the lit­er­ary greats.

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In Praise of Copying: Get Your Free Copy

Just a quick fyi: If you head over to the Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Press web site, you can grab a free copy of Mar­cus Boon’s new book, In Praise of Copy­ing, which makes the case that “copy­ing is an essen­tial part of being human, that the abil­i­ty to copy is wor­thy of cel­e­bra­tion, and that, with­out rec­og­niz­ing how inte­gral copy­ing is to being human, we can­not under­stand our­selves or the world we live in.” Boon is a writer, jour­nal­ist and Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor in the Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture depart­ment at York Uni­ver­si­ty, Toron­to. You can down­load a free copy of his book in PDF for­mat straight from this link. (Note that the text is for­mal­ly released under a Cre­ative Com­mons license.) Or you can always pur­chase a print­ed copy online.

P.S. The Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Press is offer­ing up a free e‑book of its own: The Bour­geois Virtues (632 pages) by Deirdre N. McCloskey. Head here to get a copy.

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The Best American Science Writing 2010: Free Essays

Jerome Groop­man, the New York­er staff writer and Har­vard med school prof, has edit­ed The Best Amer­i­can Sci­ence Writ­ing 2010 - a new col­lec­tion that brings togeth­er “the most cru­cial, thought-pro­vok­ing, and engag­ing sci­ence writ­ing” dur­ing the past 12 months. The 368 page book runs $10.19 online. But before you run out and buy it, let me say this: you can read many of the col­lect­ed essays online for free. The Truth About Grit by Jon­ah Lehrer; My Genome, My Self by Steven Pinker; Are We Still Evolv­ing? by Kath­leen McAu­li­ffe – they’re among 16 essays avail­able online, and they’re all includ­ed in a handy list pulled togeth­er by Metafil­ter. Mean­while, if you want to read these essays lat­er on (when you have some time to delve into longer arti­cles) give Instapa­per a try. As I’ve men­tioned before, it’s a great way to read texts in a clean for­mat on the iPad, iPhone, and Kin­dle.

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Vintage Literary T‑Shirts

Out of Print Cloth­ing “cel­e­brates the world’s great sto­ries through fash­ion,” work­ing with artists to design t‑shirts that fea­ture icon­ic book cov­ers. The cat­a­log lets you choose from Orwell’s Ani­mal Farm, Salinger’s Catch­er in the Rye, William S. Bur­roughs’ Naked Lunch, Bul­gakov’s Russ­ian clas­sic Mas­ter and Mar­gari­ta or 29 oth­er vin­tage shirts, each of which costs a fair­ly rea­son­able $28. See the full list of shirts here.

via @AndrewHazlett

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Mark Twain #1 on Amazon

The Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of Mark Twain (Vol. 1) hit the stands just yes­ter­day, and already it stands atop the Ama­zon best­seller list, leapfrog­ging past Stieg Lars­son, Bill Bryson, Jon Stew­art, and even the lat­est, sup­pos­ed­ly great­est Amer­i­can nov­el­ist, Jonathan Franzen. Although he died a cen­tu­ry again, Twain has still got it.

The 766 page auto­bi­og­ra­phy pub­lished by UC Press runs $18.99 in hard­cov­er on Ama­zon, and the Kin­dle ver­sion a far cool­er $9.99. You can read excerpts in PDF for­mat here and here. Mean­while you can also find free ver­sions of Twain’s clas­sics – Adven­tures of Huck­le­ber­ry Finn and Tom Sawyer – in our col­lec­tions of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mark Twain Cap­tured on Film by Thomas Edi­son (1909)

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The Best American Essays 2010: The Free Route

The Best Amer­i­can Essays, 2010, edit­ed by Christo­pher Hitchens, has now hit the stands. The 300-page col­lec­tion runs $10.47 online. How­ev­er, know this: You can read most of the essays online for free. These essays were orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished on web­sites of major Amer­i­can jour­nals & mag­a­zines, and there they still remain. Some notable men­tions include The Mur­der of Leo Tol­stoy: A Foren­sic Inves­ti­ga­tion by Elif Batu­manHow Ein­stein Divid­ed Amer­i­ca’s Jews by Wal­ter Isaac­sonOn John Updike by Ian McE­wanMy Genome, My Self by Steven Pinker, and Guy Walks into a Bar by David Sedaris. Metafil­ter has pulled togeth­er a full list of avail­able texts. Kudos to them. And if you want to read these essays lat­er on (when you actu­al­ly have some time) give Instapa­per a try.  It’s a won­der­ful way to read texts in a clean for­mat on the iPad, iPhone, and Kin­dle. The trusty web brows­er is always an option too.

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The Ware Tetralogy: Free SciFi Download

ware tet

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 â€“ Soft­ware and Wet­ware – won the Philip K. Dick Award for best nov­el. Lat­er Free­ware and Real­ware fol­lowed. This sum­mer, Prime Books repub­lished the tetral­o­gy in one big vol­ume, com­plete with an intro­duc­tion by William Gib­son that calls 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. For more infor­ma­tion on the book and the free down­load, vis­it here. And don’t for­get to donate to the Cre­ative Com­mons Legion of Super­heroes fundrais­ing cam­paign.

A big thanks to Rosario for the heads up here.

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David Sedaris Reads From New book, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk

squirrel seeks chipmunk

Squir­rel Seeks Chip­munk: A Mod­est Bes­tiary, the new book by David Sedaris has hit the stands last week. And now thanks to The Guardian we get Sedaris him­self read­ing a story/chapter from the col­lec­tion, “The Mouse and the Snake.” It runs near­ly 10 min­utes. Start play­ing below…

via @brainpicker

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