Johnny Depp Reads Hunter S. Thompson’s Famous “Wave Speech” from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

in Books, Film, Literature | April 10th, 2014

Hunter S. Thompson was a literary icon – a moralist, a gun nut, and the original gonzo journalist. He was the inventor of the true breakfast of champions and author of the most hilariously profane presidential obituary ever.

Of all his writing though, his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a journey through bat country and into the twisted dark heart of the American soul, is his most famous and beloved. And aside from perhaps the book’s opening line – “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold” – the most memorable section of the work is his “wave speech” which shows up in the eighth chapter. It is a poetic, heartfelt monologue about the idealism and the crushed dreams of the 1960s. Thompson himself said that the passage is “one of the best things I’ve ever fucking written.”

You can see Johnny Depp — who has played Thompson twice on the silver screen — read an abbreviated version of the speech above. You can read along below. And make sure you turn up your speakers a bit.

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.…

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
[…]

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda.… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.…

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.…

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Fear and Loathing was, of course, adapted into a 1998 film starring Depp after a very long development stage. Alex Cox – who directed the punk cult hit Repo Man – was originally slated to make the movie until he made the mistake of proposing to turn the wave speech into an animated sequence. Thompson was extremely unimpressed. Cox got canned and soon after Terry Gilliam was given the reins to the film. You can see the Gilliam’s treatment of the wave speech sequence below.

Hunter S. Thompson Interviews Keith Richards

Johnny Depp Reads Letters from Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson Gets Confronted by The Hell’s Angels

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

How the CIA Turned Doctor Zhivago into a Propaganda Weapon Against the Soviet Union

in Books, History, Literature, Politics | April 9th, 2014

Humanity has long pondered the relative might of the pen and the sword. While one time-worn aphorism does grant the advantage to the pen, most of us have entertained doubts: the sword, metaphorically or literally, seems to have won out across an awfully wide swath of history. Still, the pen has scored some impressive victories, some even in living memory. Take, for example, the CIA’s recently revealed use of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago as a propaganda weapon. Repressed in Pasternak’s native Russia, the book first appeared in Italy in 1957. The following year, the British suggested to America’s Central Intelligence Agency that the book stood a decent chance of winning hearts and minds behind the Iron Curtain — if, of course, they could get a few copies in there. A CIA memo sent across its own Soviet Russia Division subsequently pronounced Doctor Zhivago as possessed of “great propaganda value, not only for its intrinsic message and thought-provoking nature, but also for the circumstances of its publication. We have the opportunity to make Soviet citizens wonder what is wrong with their government, when a fine literary work by the man acknowledged to be the greatest living Russian writer is not even available in his own country in his own language for his own people to read.”

That evaluation comes from one of the over 130 declassified documents used by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée in their brand new history of this act of real-life literary espionage, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book. You can read an in-depth article on some of the events involved in this operation — the CIA’s printing of both hardcover and miniature paperback Russian-language editions, the not-so-clandestine distribution of copies at 1958’s Brussels Universal and International Exposition, the CIA’s unexpected alliance with the Vatican in this mission, the inept probing by Soviet “researchers” — at the Washington Post.

You can also watch a CBS This Morning clip on the book just above. Dramatic though this “Zhivago Affair” sounds, it came as neither the first nor last American use of culture as a means of destabilizing the Soviet Union. We’ve even previously featured two others: secretly-funded abstract expressionist painting, and Louis Armstrong’s 1965 East Berlin and Budapest concerts. Cold War America may have had the sword, in the form of its vast nuclear arsenal, polished and ready, but clearly it retained a certain regard for the pen — and brush, and trumpet — as well.

How the CIA Secretly Funded Abstract Expressionism During the Cold War

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Old Books Bound in Human Skin Found in Harvard Libraries (and Elsewhere in Boston)

in Books, History | April 6th, 2014

For at least a decade now, the “death of print” has seemed all but inevitable. Amidst all the nostalgia for printed literature, it’s easy to forget that mass-produced books and media, and a literate population, are fairly recent phenomena in human history. Books—whether printed or hand-copied—had a totemic status for thousands of years, given that they were kept under the protection of an educated elite, who were among the few able to read and interpret them. Even after the age of printing, books were rare and hard to come by, largely too expensive for most people to afford until the advent of paperbacks.

A grisly reminder of the book’s status as an almost magical object surfaced in Harvard’s rare book collection a few years ago. In 2006, librarians discovered at least three volumes bound in human skin—and as travel site Roadtrippers reports, “in one case, skin harvested from a man who was flayed alive.” Gruesome as all this seems, the practice of skin-binding was apparently not the sole province of serial killers:

As it turns out, the practice of using human skin to bind books was actually pretty popular during the 17th century. It’s referred to as Anthropodermic bibliopegy and proved pretty common when it came to anatomical textbooks. Medical professionals would often use the flesh of cadavers they’d dissected during their research.

The book supposedly made of flayed skin is a Spanish law text from the seventeenth century titled Practicarum quaestionum circa leges regias (above). Despite an inscription naming the deceased and claiming his skin as the binding, this volume has actually just been identified as sheepskin—according to a Harvard Law Library blog post from yesterday—“thanks to a technique for identifying proteins that was developed in the last twenty years.” Speculates the Law Library post:

Perhaps before it arrived at HLS [Harvard Law School] in 1946, the book was bound in a different binding at some point in its history. Or perhaps the inscription was simply the product of someone’s macabre imagination.

Nevertheless, other human skin-bound books exist—as far as librarians and scientists can determine. Former director of libraries for the University of Kentucky Lawrence S. Thompson claims that the practice dates as far back as a 13th century French Bible and became more common in the 16th and 17th centuries. A 1933 Crimson article mentioned another skin-bound book in a collection of miniature books, including this graphic detail: “removal of 20 square inches of skin from his back failed to impair the health of its donor, who is still alive and in the best of condition.”

Another skin-bound volume, which Thompson calls “the most famous of all anthropodermic bindings,” resides across the river from Harvard at independent library the Boston Athenaeum. Called The Highwayman: Narrative of the Life of James Allen alias George Walton (above), the book is a memoir of the titular outlaw. The author, reports the Crimson, “was impressed by the courage of a man whom he once attacked, and when Walton was facing execution, he asked to have his memoir bound in his own skin and presented to the brave man.” Thumb through (so to speak) a digital copy of Walton’s 1837 memoir above, and imagine being the recipient of such a gift.

via Roadtrippers

How a Book Thief Forged a Rare Edition of Galileo’s Scientific Work, and Almost Pulled it Off

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Books You Think Every Intelligent Person Should Read: Crime and Punishment, Moby-Dick & Beyond (Many Free Online)

in Books | April 6th, 2014

While I normally try not to get involved with comments on web sites (you know what I mean), I’d rather get involved with the comments of some web sites than others. I doubt that underneath any Youtube video, for example, you’d find dozens and dozens of well-considered suggestions for the canon of books every intelligent person should read, as we did here at Open Culture when we put the question to you on Wednesday. In the comments to that post as well as on our Facebook Page, we received a host of responses scattered satisfyingly across the textual map: everything from Michel Foucault to Foucault’s Pendulum, Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to Bryson’s Short History of Nearly Everything, 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant to reptilian conspiracy-envisioning ex-footballer David Icke. The top-ranking volume? Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (available, incidentally, in our free eBook collection: Kindle from Amazon – Read Online), followed by Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (available there too: iPad/iPhone — Kindle + Other Formats). Let none say that Open Culture readers shy away from weighty literature.

Other, shorter novels popularly suggested include Voltaire’s Candide (iPad/iPhone — Kindle + Other Formats), Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (iPad/iPhone – Kindle + Other Formats), and George Orwell’s 1984 (Read Online). We also received a number of votes for books famously pored over for thousands upon thousands of hours by their enthusiasts, such as the Bible, Dante’s Divine Comedy (iPad/iPhone – Kindle + Other Formats), and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. (Given the formidable internet presence of Rand’s readers, I expected more of an inundation of her titles, but they must not have turned out in force this time.) Such classic and deceptively universal guides to strategy as Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (iPad/iPhone — Kindle + Other Formats – Read Online) and Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (iPad/iPhone — Kindle + Other Formats) also placed well, as did books like Plato’s Republic (iPad/iPhone – Kindle + Other Formats — Read Online), Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (iPad/iPhone – Kindle + Other Formats), and Hermann Hesse’s Siddartha (Kindle + Other Formats) — the ones you probably got assigned once, but that you may not then have understood why you should actually read.

The recommendations fascinate, but so do their justifications. (My personal favorite: “It’s a book about shamanism, although it’s not what you would expect from a socially accepted description of shamanism.”) Jo Stafford calls Crime and Punishment and Moby-Dick, the two big winners, “perfect examples of how great fiction can pose the ‘big questions’, particularly around what it means to act morally.” Moira pitches Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as a “modern study of the schism between classicist and romanticist thinking.” Nick Williams says Candide “still feeds the inner cynic,” and Jason considers Walden “a better lesson on capitalism than The Wealth of Nations.” Arthur McMillan recommends Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by holding out the promise that it “encapsulates the sheer futility of everything[ness].” Another reader suggests William Godwin’s Political Enquiry “to be reminded what books inspired us to be: free.” Wise words indeed, Mr. Beer N. Hockey.

What Books Should Every Intelligent Person Read?: Tell Us Your Picks; We’ll Tell You Ours

See Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky’s Reading List For Having an Intelligent Conversation

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

What Books Should Every Intelligent Person Read?: Tell Us Your Picks; We’ll Tell You Ours

in Books | April 2nd, 2014

Back in 2011 we featured astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s list of the books “every single intelligent person on the planet” should read. His picks include the Bible (“to learn that it’s easier to be told by others what to think and believe than it is to think for yourself”); Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (“to learn that capitalism is an economy of greed, a force of nature unto itself”); and Machiavelli’s The Prince (“to learn that people not in power will do all they can to acquire it, and people in power will do all they can to keep it”). The list, which has generated a great deal of interest and discussion, leads you to think about the very nature of not just what constitutes essential reading, but what defines an “intelligent person.” Should every such individual really read any book in particular? Does it matter if others already acknowledge these books as essential, or can they have gone thus far undiscovered?

Admirably, Tyson manages to compile his selections of books well-known across the English-speaking world into a list that, as a whole, somehow avoids dullness or predictability. In eschewing obscurantism, he makes the perhaps daring implication that an intelligent person must connect to a widely shared culture, rather than demonstrating their brainpower by getting through volume upon little-read volume, written in the most labyrinthine language, expounding on the most abstract subject matter, or grappling with the knottiest philosophical problems. This inspires me to highlight five more pieces of reading material, all intellectually stimulating but accessibly written, all referenced frequently in countless areas of human endeavor, and all available in our collection of free eBooks:

Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (iPad/iPhone – Kindle + Other Formats), because the ideas that “you have power over your mind, not outside events,” or that “the happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts,” or that “everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact” and “everything we see is a perspective, not the truth” apply as much today as they did in antiquity.
Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (iPad/iPhone (Vol 1 – Vol 2) – Kindle + Other Formats), because we could all use a firmer grasp on what we mean when we label someone “quixotic,” a simple description that takes its name from a surprisingly complex and unexpectedly admirable character.
James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (iPad/iPhone – Kindle + Other Formats) because, whatever ideas you may have about Joyce — positive or negative — if you haven’t yet cracked his first novel, I guarantee a reading experience unlike any you might expect.
Michel de Montaigne’s Essays (iPad/iPhone – Kindle + Other Formats), because not only do his pieces exemplify (because they practically invented) the strongest short form to capture the paths of human thought, but they feel especially relevant now in this internet-driven “age of the essay.”
Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (volume 1: iPad/iPhone – Kindle + Other Formats — Read Online; volume 2: iPad/iPhone — Kindle + Other Formats — Read Online), because the Frenchman’s diagnosis of the advantages and liabilities of this then-young and experimental country still give us much to consider today, not just in regard to America, but — now that so many countries have gone democratic, each in their own way — most of the world.

None will have come as news to you, but some it may take you a moment to realize that, hey, you never did get around to them in the first place. Take in books like these, and not only will they resonate richly with everything else already knocking around your brain — you do read Open Culture, after all — but they’ll let you in on what, exactly, all those readers and writers around the world and through history have meant when they cite them so readily.

We also invite you to tell us: which books, freely available or otherwise, do you consider essential reading for the intelligent? Have I missed the boat by failing to include Finnegans Wake (Read Online), say, or the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (iPad/iPhone — Kindle + Other Formats — Read Online)? Let loose your own recommendations and we’ll create a compilation of your best picks in the comings days.

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 88 ) |

Read an Excerpt of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1926 Translation of Beowulf Before It’s Finally Published Next Month

in Books, Literature, Poetry | April 2nd, 2014

For the first time, J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1926 translation of the 11th century epic poem Beowulf will be published this May by HarperCollins, edited and with commentary by his son Christopher. The elder Tolkien, says his son, “seems never to have considered its publication.” He left it along with several other unpublished manuscripts at the time of his death in 1973. The edition will also include a story called Sellic Spell and excerpts from a series of lectures on Beowulf Tolkien delivered at Oxford in the 1930s. Tolkien did publish one of those lectures, “The Monster and the Critic,” in 1936. In this “epoch-making paper,” writes Seamus Heaney in the introduction to his hugely popular 1999 dual language verse edition, Tolkien treated the Beowulf poet as “an imaginative writer,” not a historical reconstruction. His “brilliant literary treatment changed the way the poem was valued and initiated a new era—and new terms—of appreciation.” This very same thing could be said of Heaney’s translation which, true to his stated goals, brought the poem out of academic conferences and classrooms and into living rooms and coffee shops everywhere. (You can hear Heaney read from that translation here.)

Nowhere in Heaney’s introduction to his version does he mention Tolkien’s translation of the poem, so we must presume he did not know of it. Long before Tolkien’s lectures and translation, Beowulf had been perhaps the most revered poem in the English language, at least since the 18th century, when the sole manuscript was rescued from fire and and translated and disseminated widely. Despite that status, Beowulf was not actually written in English—not an English we would recognize—but in Old English, or Anglo-Saxon. As readers of Heaney’s dual translation will know, that distant provincial ancestor of the modern global language, named for the mixture of Germanic peoples who inhabited England 1000 years ago, appears mostly alien to us now. (To add to the strangeness, its unfamiliar alphabet once consisted entirely of runes).

The poem, moreover, is not set in England, but where Shakespeare set his Hamlet, Denmark. Its titular hero, a prince from Geat (ancient Sweden), stalks a monster named Grendel on behalf of Danish king Hroðgar, killing the monster’s mother along the way. Tolkien’s almost universally beloved body of fiction was deeply influenced by Beowulf. Nevertheless, his translation may be less accessible than Heaney’s, though no less beautiful, perhaps, for different reasons. In Heaney’s verse, one hears Ted Hughes, some echoes of Milton, Heaney’s own voice. If we are to credit the redditor who posted a now-defunct 2003 article from Canadian newspaper National Post that quotes from Tolkien’s translation, the Hobbit author’s verse hews to a more direct correspondence with the Anglo Saxon, a language made of giant rocks and timber and crashing waves, not elegant, elaborated clauses. The National Post article announces the discovery at Oxford of the Tolkien translation by English Professor Michael Drout (a story he’s since debunked), and quotes from both Heaney and Tolkien. See the comparison below:

Heaney’s translation:

Time went by, the boat was
on water,
in close under the cliffs.
Men climbed eagerly up the
gangplank,
sand churned in surf, warriors
loaded
a cargo of weapons, shining
war-gear
in the vessel’s hold, then
heaved out,
away with a will in their
wood-wreathed ship.

Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf and his men setting sail:

On went the hours:
on
ocean afloat
under cliff was their craft.
Now climb blithely
brave man aboard;
breakers pounding
ground the shingle.
Gleaming harness
they hove to the bosom of the
bark, armour
with cunning forged then cast
her forth
to voyage triumphant,
valiant-timbered
fleet foam twisted.

One wonders what the recently departed Irish poet would have said had he lived to read this Tolkien edition. Might it, as Heaney said of his lectures, change the way the poem is valued? Or might he see it resembling other difficult attempts to make modern English replicate the strongly inflected built-in rhythms of Anglo-Saxon—a language, Tolkien once said, from “the dark heathen ages beyond the memory of song.”

You can pre-order a copy of Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf here.

Discover J.R.R. Tolkien’s Personal Book Cover Designs for The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

“The Tolkien Professor” Presents Three Free Courses on The Lord of the Rings

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Lists of the Best Sentences — Opening, Closing, and Otherwise — in English-Language Novels

in Books, Literature | April 1st, 2014

I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

— James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?

— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.

— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

You’ve almost certainly read all three of these sentences before, or even if you don’t remember the lines in particular, you’ve probably read the famous novels they come from. The American Scholar highlights them as three of the ten finest in English-language literature, alongside other sentences composed by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Hersey, and Ernest Hemingway. Writing at Poynter.org, Roy Peter Clark explains just what makes these sentences so great, from Joyce’s use of “forge” (“For the narrator it means to strengthen metal in fire. But it also means to fake, to counterfeit, perhaps a gentle tug at [the protagonist’s] hubris”) to Austen’s structural elegance (“Who could not admire a sentence with such a clear demarcation beginning, middle, and end?”) to Nabokov’s reflection of his narrator’s self-delusion.

At The Atlantic, Joe Fassler has separately collected 22 writers’ own favorite novel-opening lines, a list that includes the one from Nabokov’s highly quotable novel and another from later in Joyce’s oeuvre:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, chosen by Jonathan Santofler

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

— James Joyce, Ulysses, chosen by Lydia Davis

I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire.

— J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, chosen by Anthony Marra

If all these don’t satiate your appetite for well-wrought sentences, the American Book Review has not just its own rundown of the 100 best first lines from novels, but of the 100 best last lines as well, a list that features Coetzee’s grim colonial fable as well as the work of Franzen himself:

This is not the scene I dreamed of. Like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere.

— J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life.

— Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“You can trust me,” R.V. says, watching her hand.” “I’m a man of my

— David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System

Before you leave a comment pointing out that apparent fragment of Wallace’s sentence just above, let me reassure you that it appears exactly like that in The Broom of the System — the novel just stops there — and that, if you read all the way to that point, you’ll find it a pretty brilliant choice. This just goes to show that the sentence, though undoubtedly the fundamental unit for any writer (“All you have to do is write one true sentence,” Hemingway would say), always needs a context. This meta-list of best-sentence lists at Metafilter has many more high-quality sentences for you to admire, and a fair few intriguing enough to send you right out to go read them in context.

You can find some of the great books mentioned above in our collection of 575 Free eBooks.

Nabokov Reads Lolita, Names the Great Books of the 20th Century

James Joyce Reads From Ulysses and Finnegans Wake In His Only Two Recordings (1924/1929)

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

George R.R. Martin Releases a Free Chapter From The Winds of Winter: Read It Online

in Books, e-books | March 30th, 2014

In recent days, George R.R. Martin published a blog post that begins, “Hiya kids, hiya hiya hiya. With season 4 of HBO’s GAME OF THRONES almost upon us, I thought the time was ripe for me to give my readers another taste of WINDS OF WINTER.” The new chapter, he tells us, “is actually an old chapter. But no, it’s not one I’ve published or posted before.” The chapter, called “Mercy,” opens with these words:

She woke with a gasp, not knowing who she was, or where.

The smell of blood was heavy in her nostrils… or was that her nightmare, lingering? She had dreamed of wolves again, of running through some dark pine forest with a great pack at her hells, hard on the scent of prey.

Half-light filled the room, grey and gloomy. Shivering, she sat up in bed and ran a hand across her scalp. Stubble bristled against her palm. I need to shave before Izembaro sees. Mercy, I’m Mercy, and tonight I’ll be raped and murdered. Her true name was Mercedene, but Mercy was all anyone ever called her…

Except in dreams. She took a breath to quiet the howling in her heart, trying to remember more of what she’d dreamt, but most of it had gone already. There had been blood in it, though, and a full moon overhead, and a tree that watched her as she ran.

You can read the chapter in full here. Martin notes that you can also enjoy a new Tyrion chapter, “that is live and available with the ICE & FIRE app.” It’s free on iTunes.

Related Content:

Neil Gaiman’s Free Short Stories

Download 33 Great Sci-Fi Stories by Philip K. Dick as Free Audio Books & Free eBooks

Free: Isaac Asimov’s Epic Foundation Trilogy Dramatized in Classic Audio

The Ware Tetralogy: Free SciFi Download

575 Free eBooks: Download Great Books for Free

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Johnny Depp Reads Hunter S. Thompson’s Famous “Wave Speech” from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

How the CIA Turned Doctor Zhivago into a Propaganda Weapon Against the Soviet Union

Old Books Bound in Human Skin Found in Harvard Libraries (and Elsewhere in Boston)

The Books You Think Every Intelligent Person Should Read: Crime and Punishment, Moby-Dick & Beyond (Many Free Online)

What Books Should Every Intelligent Person Read?: Tell Us Your Picks; We’ll Tell You Ours

Read an Excerpt of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1926 Translation of Beowulf Before It’s Finally Published Next Month

Lists of the Best Sentences — Opening, Closing, and Otherwise — in English-Language Novels

George R.R. Martin Releases a Free Chapter From The Winds of Winter: Read It Online

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Receive our Daily Email

FREE UPDATES!

GET OUR DAILY EMAIL

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

Sign up for Newsletter

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search