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 Batuman, How Einstein Divided America’s Jews by Walter Isaacson, On John Updike by Ian McEwan, My 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.
The Best American Essays 2010: The Free Route
The Ware Tetralogy: Free SciFi Download
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. 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.
David Sedaris Reads From New book, 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…
Jeff Bezos: What Life Story Will You Write?
A quick bit of inspiration from the man who has changed the way we buy books, and now the way we’re reading them – Jeff Bezos (CEO, Amazon). Speaking at Princeton’s graduation last May, Bezos discussed the life choices that we all face: Will you follow dogma? Or be original? Will you play it safe? Or take good risks? Will you be a cynic? Or a builder? Will you be clever at the expense of others? Or will you be kind?
In short, your life story comes down to your choices. What story will you write? And how will it read when you’re 80?
Related Content:
Steve Jobs Talks Life at Stanford Graduation
74 Free Banned Books (for Banned Books Week)
To commemorate Banned Books Week, the always great Internet Archive has opened up access to 74 banned books. The collection features some serious pieces of literature (James Joyce’s Ulysses, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, Huxley’s Brave New World, etc.); some traditional children’s classics (Winnie the Pooh); and some sinister books of unquestionable historical importance (Mein Kampf). These books can be downloaded in multiple digital formats, including sometimes ePub and Kindle formats. This gives you the ability to read the the works on the Kindle, iPad, Nook and other mainstream ebook readers. (See note below.) But the old fashioned computer will also do the job.
Censorship remains a serious problem in the US and beyond. The American Library Association recorded 460 attempts in 2009 to restrict books in US schools and libraries. But they estimate that this represents only 20–25% of actual attempts to censor. All of this censorship is neatly (and rather specifically) tracked on Google Maps.
NOTE: Please see our previous post describing how to add files to the Kindle. Meanwhile this page describes how to transfer ePub files to the iPad.
The Paris Review Interviews Now Online
The Paris Review, the great literary journal co-founded by George Plimpton, unveiled last week a new web site and a big archive of interviews with famous literary figures. Spanning five decades, the interviews often talk about the “how” of literature (to borrow a phrase from Salman Rushdie) – that is, how writers go about writing. Rummaging through the archive, you will encounter conversations with TS Eliot, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Ernest Hemingway, Simone de Beauvoir, Saul Bellow, Jorge Luis Borges, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, John Steinbeck, Joan Didion, Kurt Vonnegut, Eudora Welty, Raymond Carver, Russell Banks, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Paul Auster, etc. And, amazingly, this list only scratches the surface of what’s available.
Note: These interviews are separately available in book format: The Paris Review Interviews, Volumes 1–4.
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Philip Roth’s Creative Surge & the Death of the Novel
Philip Roth, now 77 years old, keeps publishing with a certain urgency. Everyman in 2006, Exit Ghost in 2007, Indignation 2008, The Humbling last year, and next comes Nemesis, due to be released in early October. After The Humbling hit the shelves, magazine editor Tina Brown conducted a rare video interview with Roth, and they covered a fair amount of ground in 14 minutes: his creative surge, how he approaches writing sex scenes, Obama’s literary talents, the coming extinction of the novel and whether the Kindle can make any bit of difference, etc. You can watch the video above, or read a transcript here.
Now a little freebie. A nice copy of Indignation goes to the first reader who sends along a compelling piece of open/intelligent media that we choose to post on the site. (If you’re looking for more guidance on what we have in mind, please read the tips on this page.) You can submit your media picks here. Cheers…
Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom: The First Two Chapters
Last week, Jonathan Franzen appeared on the cover of TIME magazine – the first time in a decade that a living novelist has graced the cover page. Authors only get there if they’re flirting with greatness (TIME’s piece is called “Jonathan Franzen: Great American Novelist”) and if they have a new novel coming out. Freedom hits the bookstores next Tuesday, but you can get started with the first two chapters right now. Good Neighbors and Agreeable both appear on The New Yorker magazine web site.
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