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.
Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps.
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.
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 Gritby 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.
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.
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.
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.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
