Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, has a new book coming out in early October, The Circle, a novel about “a young woman who goes to work at an omnipotent technology company and gets sucked into a corporate culture that knows no distinction between work and life, public and private.” Breaking with tradition, The New York Times has placed the novel’s cover on the cover of its own Sunday Magazine. It has also printed a lengthy excerpt from the book. Read it online here, or listen right below (or on iTunes) to a reading of the excerpt by actor Don Graham. It runs 46 minutes.
Earlier this month, we highlighted The 10 Greatest Films of All Time According to 846 Film Critics. Featuring films by Hitchcock, Kubrick, Welles and Fellini, this master list came together in 2012 when Sight & Sound(the cinema journal of the British Film Institute) asked contemporary critics and directors to name their 12 favorite movies. Nearly 900 cinephiles responded, and, from those submissions, a meta list of 10 was culled.
So how about something similar for books, you ask? For that, we can look back to 2007, when J. Peder Zane, the book editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, asked 125 top writers to name their favorite books — writers like Norman Mailer, Annie Proulx, Stephen King, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, and Michael Chabon. The lists were all compiled in an edited collection, The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, and then prefaced by one uber list, “The Top Top Ten.”
Zane explained the methodology behind the uber list as follows: “The participants could pick any work, by any writer, by any time period.… After awarding ten points to each first-place pick, nine to second-place picks, and so on, the results were tabulated to create the Top Top Ten List — the very best of the best.”
The short list appears below, along with links to electronic versions of the works (and traditional published editions). There’s one notable exception, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. We couldn’t provide that electronic text, but we do have something special — an audio recording of Nabokov reading a chapter from his controversial 1955 novel.
The texts listed below are permanently housed in our collection of Free eBooks, along with many other classics. In many cases, you’ll find audio versions of the same works in our ever-growing collection of Free Audio Books. If you have questions about how to load files onto your Kindle, please see this related instructional video.
Got an issue with any of the selections? Tell us all about it in the comments section below.
It comes as no surprise that Roald Dahl, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, possessed a sweet tooth. Having dazzled young readers with visions of Cavity-Filling Caramels, Everlasting Gobstoppers, and snozzberry-flavored wallpaper, Dahl’s candy of choice was the more pedestrian Kit-Kat bar. In addition to savoring one daily (a luxury little Charlie Bucket could but dream of, prior to winning that most golden of tickets) he invented a frozen confection called “Kit-Kat Pudding.”
The original recipe is, appropriately, simple enough for a child to make. Stack as many Kit-Kats as you like into a tower, using whipped cream for mortar, then shove the entire thing into the freezer, and leave it there until solid.
Book publicist and self-described literary fangirl Nicole Villeneuve does him one better on Paper and Salt, a food blog devoted to the recipes of iconic authors. Her re-imagined and renamed Frozen Homemade Kit-Kat Cakeadds bittersweet chocolate ganache, replacing Dahl’s beloved candy bars with high quality wafer cookies. It remains a pretty straight-forward preparation, not quite as decadent as the Marquis de Sade’s Molten Chocolate Espresso Cake with Pomegranate, but surely more to Dahl’s liking than Jane Austen’s Brown Butter Bread Pudding Tarts would have been. (The author once wrote that he preferred his chocolate straight.)
Villeneuve spices her entry with historical context and anecdotes regarding early 20th-century candy marketing, Dahl’s hatred of the Cadbury Crème Egg, and his dog’s hankering for Smarties. Details such as these make Paper and Salt, which features plenty of savories to go with the sweet, a delicious read even for non-cooks.
Novelist Thomas Pynchon does not, as his readers well know, do publicity. But does he need to? When a man has written books like V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow, doesn’t the appearance of a new one publicize itself, in some sense? Pynchon’s eighth novel Bleeding Edge, a seemingly hard-boiled yet characteristically askew and paranoia-flavored tale of post-tech-bubble but pre‑9/11 New York, comes out on September 17th, and a certain class of fan has no doubt spent hours scrutinizing the excerpt its publisher Penguin has already released. A certain other class of fan, the sort who spent long dorm-room hours with the early books but who somehow never summoned the will for the more recent ones, will at least have felt their curiosity piqued. To another class of fan entirely, those who feel like they could get into Pynchon but can’t quite determine why or how, we offer the documentary above, Fosco and Donatello Dubini’s A Journey into the Mind of P.
“I think of Pynchon as a cryptogram,” says one reader interviewed in the film. “We are almost, in a sense, codebreakers. He presents a puzzle that we are trying to crack.” That, as well as anything, sums up my own findings from talking to Pynchon die-hards about their enthusiasm for their author of choice. A Journey into the Mind of P actually examines two minds at once: the mind of Pynchon the writer, and the mind of the Pynchon fan, which seeks not only to grasp the culturally sweeping, information-dense heightened reality of the novels, but also to construct a coherent image of the man who creates that reality. Thus far, these readers have had to draw this image from only the novels themselves (though, in several cases, large and labyrinthine ones), and for the foreseeable future they must continue to do so. At least Bleeding Edge, whatever its reception, will add almost 500 more pages to their body of available evidence. Best of luck, Pynchon exegetes with copies on pre-order. Perhaps the rest of you would rather start with the book trailer just above. A new Pynchon novel may always make a splash, but Penguin’s publicity department isn’t taking any chances.
What would you do if you crossed paths with a jingling lost thing whose oven-shaped body, crustaceous claws, and fleshy tentacles would seem right at home in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights?
Scream? Run? Release your bowels?
The anonymous narrator ofThe Lost Thing, a fifteen-minute animation born of Shaun Tan’s all-ages picture book, attempts, instead, to identify it empirically through careful observation, calibrated measurement, and controlled experimentation. When the scientific approach fails, he assumes responsibility for his strange find, leading it through a clanking, grimy landscape where sanitation crews deflate beach balls with pointy sticks after the joyless holiday crowds are dismissed—a vision of steampunk in defeat.
We’re loathe to hit you with any more spoilers. Suffice it to say that this is a fine example of innovatively adapted source material, and that eventually our stoic hero—voiced by British-born Australian comic Tim Minchin—and his charge arrive in a landscape that should cause the inhabitants of the Island of Misfit Toys to stop mooning over Santa.
Note: Elmore Leonard, the crime writer who gave us Get Shorty, Freaky Deaky, and Glitz, died at his home in Bloomfield Village, Michigan. He was 87. If you never had a chance to read Leonard, you can start with “Ice Man,” a 2012 story that appeared in The Atlantic. It’s free online. You can also get a feel for his writing by revisiting a post written here by Mike Springer last year. It gives an overview of Leonard’s tips for aspiring writers. And, in so doing, it provides valuable insight into how Leonard approached his craft. Elmore Leonard’s Ultimate Guide for Would-Be Writers is reprinted in full below.
“If it sounds like writing,” says Elmore Leonard, “I rewrite it.”
Leonard’s writing sounds the way people talk. It rings true. In novels like Get Shorty, Rum Punch and Out of Sight, Leonard has established himself as a master stylist, and while his characters may be lowlifes, his books are received and admired in the highest circles. In 1998 Martin Amis recalled visiting Saul Bellow and seeing Leonard’s books on the old man’s shelves. “Bellow and I agreed,” said Amis, “that for an absolutely reliable and unstinting infusion of narrative pleasure in a prose miraculously purged of all false qualities, there was no one quite like Elmore Leonard.”
In 2006 Leonard appeared on BBC Two’s The Culture Show to talk about the craft of writing and give some advice to aspiring authors. In the program, shown above, Leonard talks about his deep appreciation of Ernest Hemingway’s work in general, and about his particular debt to the 1970 crime novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George V. Higgins. While explaining his approach, Leonard jots down three tips:
“You have to listen to your characters.”
“Don’t worry about what your mother thinks of your language.”
“Try to get a rhythm.”
“I always refer to style as sound,” says Leonard. “The sound of the writing.” Some of Leonard’s suggestions appeared in a 2001 New York Times article that became the basis of his 2007 book, Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing. Here are those rules in outline form:
You can read more from Leonard on his rules in the 2001 Times article. And you can read his new short story, “Ice Man,” in The Atlantic.
Librarians are breaking the mold lately and flirting with the world of hip hop and punk. Courtesy of The New York Public Library Tumblr, we have Chicago librarians paying homage to The Beastie Boys’s 1994 video, “Sabotage,” directed by Spike Jonze. Of course, the original 1994 video paid comedic tribute to TV crime shows of the 1970s, shows like Hawaii Five‑O and Starsky and Hutch. So what we have above is a tribute to a tribute.
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