Cour­tesy of the radio pro­gram Open Source, we get an intrigu­ing and widerang­ing inter­view with Philip
Roth, where he talks can­did­ly about his lat­est and 27th nov­el Every­man, a work that takes an exis­ten­tial­ly anguish­ing look at the end of life. We also get Roth read­ing from oth­er past nov­els, talk­ing about the day-to-day prac­tice of writ­ing, and offer­ing thoughts on the cur­rent state of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. You can catch the inter­view in one of three ways: iTunes, Rss feed, mp3 stream.

For oth­er inter­views with promi­nent thinkers, see our page called Smart Talks — Lead­ing Thinkers in Mul­ti-Media.

Let’s go into Christ­mas on the right note, with a free pod­cast of Charles Dick­en’s A Christ­mas Car­ol. (Find it here on iTunes.) Writ­ten in 1843, Dick­en’s tale remains one of the most pop­u­lar Christ­mas sto­ries of all time. It gave us the indeli­ble char­ac­ters of Ebenez­er Scrooge, Tiny Tim, and the Ghosts of Christ­mas Past, Present, and Future. And it invent­ed the notion of “christ­mas spir­it.” This pod­cast is rather well read. If you’d like to read along with the actu­al text, you can get a free etext here, cour­tesy of Project Guten­berg.

Also, you can find oth­er free Christ­mas sto­ries at Lib­rivox. On this page, you can stream mp3s of many dif­fer­ent hol­i­day tales.

For more free audio books, check out our Audio Book Pod­cast Col­lec­tion. We now have over 40 clas­sics list­ed and ready to down­load. Hap­py hol­i­days.

Google has always shied away from the con­tent cre­ation busi­ness. While Yahoo spent pre­cious resources devel­op­ing expen­sive con­tent, the Google folks con­tent­ed them­selves with devel­op­ing tech­nol­o­gy that orga­nized the rest of the world’s infor­ma­tion. And it paid off well. Giv­en this approach, it was some­what strange to stum­ble upon an edi­to­ri­al­ized part of their web site that invites users to “Explore Shake­speare with Google.” But we’re glad we did.

Google’s Shake­speare prod­uct is part of the com­pa­ny’s larg­er Book Search ini­tia­tive, which, to boil it down, involves scan­ning mil­lions of books, putting them on Google’s servers, and allow­ing users to search the print uni­verse like they do the world of web con­tent. Although some aspects of the project have proven to be high­ly con­tro­ver­sial (name­ly, the deci­sion to scan mil­lions of copy­right­ed texts), oth­er aspects have been eas­i­ly wel­comed by the pub­lish­ing com­mu­ni­ty. This includes the deci­sion to scan and archive a panoply of old, pub­lic domain texts.

This is where we get to Google’s Shake­speare. What you’ll find here is a col­lec­tion of all of the Bard’s plays in full text. The his­to­ries, tragedies, come­dies, romances — they are all here. The folks at Google­plex give you the abil­i­ty to access each play in its entire­ty and peruse it online. Or, alter­na­tive­ly,  you can down­load each play as a PDF file, which gives you the abil­i­ty to print the text and work through it in new ways. This kind of edi­to­r­i­al col­lec­tion is hard to argue with. In fact, we’d like to see more col­lec­tions like it. But some­thing tells us that this isn’t like­ly — that the Bard (oh, and Chi­na) is just about the only thing for which Google will make an excep­tion.

Last week, The New York Times’ Book Review pub­lished its list, 100 Notable Books of the Year and it has since fol­lowed up with a whit­tled down list, The 10 Best Books of 2006. It’s boiled down to 5 works of fic­tion, and 5 non-fic­tion, and here’s what it looks like:

FICTION

ABSURDISTAN — Gary Shteyn­gart
THE COLLECTED STORIES OF AMY HEMPEL — Amy Hempel
THE EMPEROR’S CHILDREN — Claire Mes­sud
THE LAY OF THE LAND — Richard Ford
SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS — Mar­isha Pessl

NONFICTION

FALLING THROUGH THE EARTH: A Mem­oir — Danielle Trussoni
THE LOOMING TOWER: Al-Qae­da and the Road to 9/11. — Lawrence Wright.
MAYFLOWER: A Sto­ry of Courage, Com­mu­ni­ty, and War — Nathaniel Philbrick
THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA: A Nat­ur­al His­to­ry of Four Meals — Michael Pol­lan
THE PLACES IN BETWEEN — Rory Stew­art

(Note: This list won’t appear in print until the Decem­ber 10th.)