Hysterical Literature: Art & Sexuality Collide in Readings of Whitman, Emerson & Other Greats (NSFW)

in Biology, Film, Life, Literature | March 27th, 2015

Without shame the man I like knows and avows the deliciousness of his sex,

Without shame the woman I like knows and avows hers.

Thus spaketh Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass. 160 years after that poem’s publication, how might that most American of American Romantics react to the spectacle of an attractive young woman pleasuring herself with his work, as an unseen hand beneath the table surreptitiously pleasures her with the Cadillac of vibrators?

The peephole is much larger than it would’ve been in 1855. Hysterical Literature was conceived as an online project in which each session’s featured female participant chooses a resonant text, then reads it aloud until a Hitachi Magic Wand puts an end to her ability to form coherent sentences.

Creator Clayton Cubitt has complained that the orgasmic element and the status of certain celebrity participants like comedian Margaret Cho have preoccupied the press. His preference is for viewers to take a more holistic approach, viewing the experience with some “mystery and magic and ‘WTF.’”

Accordingly, let us focus upon some of the selected works:

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson

The Necrophilia Variations by Supervert

Really, no Anaïs Nin? I would’ve thought…

The most recent contributor to the series is also its oldest, 60-year-old Janet, below, who had to take leave of Whitman’s pal, Ralph Waldo Emerson, not once but twice in eight minutes.

Cumulatively, these sessions make a marvelously frank primer for actors or directors charged with creating realistic sex scenes. The dichotomy of Hysterical Lit’s staging ensures that things are fairly respectable above the waist, thus satisfying YouTube’s Community Guidelines.

Daring female lovers of literature should be advised that Cubitt seeks to include more women of color, older participants, and non-English texts. No word on who exactly is under that table. Drain your pent-up rivers by applying here.

via Kottke

This is Your Brain on Sex and Religion: Experiments in Neuroscience

An Introduction to World Literature by a Cast Of Literary & Academic Stars (Free Course)

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The (Urban) Legend of Ernest Hemingway’s Six-Word Story: “For sale, Baby shoes, Never worn.”

in Literature | March 24th, 2015

A piercingly dark piece of writing, taking the heart of a Dickens or Dostoevsky novel and carving away all the rest, Ernest Hemingway’s six-word story—fabled forerunner of flash- and twitter-fiction—is shorter than many a story’s title:

For sale, Baby shoes, Never worn.

The extreme terseness in this elliptical tragedy has made it a favorite example of writing teachers over the past several decades, a display of the power of literary compression in which, writes a querent to the site Quote Investigator, “the reader must cooperate in the construction of the larger narrative that is obliquely limned by these words.” Supposedly composed sometime in the ’20s at The Algonquin (or perhaps Luchow’s, depending on whom you ask), the six-word story, it’s said, came from a ten-dollar bet Hemingway made at a lunch with some other writers that he could write a novel in six words. After penning the famous line on a napkin, he passed it around the table, and collected his winnings. That’s the popular lore, anyway. But the truth is much less colorful.

In fact, it seems that versions of the six-word story appeared long before Hemingway even began to write, at least as early as 1906, when he was only 7, in a newspaper classified section called “Terse Tales of the Town,” which published an item that read, “For sale, baby carriage, never been used. Apply at this office.” Another, very similar, version appeared in 1910, then another, suggested as the title for a story about “a wife who has lost her baby,” in a 1917 essay by William R. Kane, who thought up “Little Shoes, Never Worn.” Then again in 1920, writes David Haglund in Slate, the supposed Hemingway line appears in a “1921 newspaper column by Roy K. Moulton, who ‘printed a brief note that he attributed to someone named Jerry,’ ”:

There was an ad in the Brooklyn “Home Talk” which read, “Baby carriage for sale, never used.” Would that make a wonderful plot for the movies?

Many more examples of the narrative device abound, including a 1927 comic strip describing a seven-word version—“For Sale, A Baby Carriage; Never Used!”—as “the greatest short story in the world.” The more that Haglund and Quote Investigator’s Garson O’Toole looked into the matter, the harder they found it to “believe that Hemingway had anything to do with the tale.”

It is possible Hemingway, wittingly or not, stole the story from the classifieds or elsewhere. He was a newspaperman after all, perhaps guaranteed to have come into contact with some version of it. But there’s no evidence that he wrote or talked about the six-word story, or that the lunch bet at The Algonquin ever took place. Instead, it appears that a literary agent, Peter Miller, made up the story whole cloth in 1974 and later published it in his 1991 book, Get Published! Get Produced!: A Literary Agent’s Tips on How to Sell Your Writing.

The legend of the bet and the six-word story grew: Arthur C. Clarke repeated it in a 1998 Reader’s Digest essay, and Miller mentioned it again in a 2006 book. Meanwhile, suspicions arose, and the final debunking occurred in a 2012 scholarly article in The Journal of Popular Culture by Frederick A. Wright, who concluded that no evidence links the six-word story to Hemingway.

So should we blame Miller for ostensibly creating an urban legend, or thank him for giving competitive minimalists something to beat, and inspiring the entire genre of the “six-word memoir”? That depends, I suppose, on what you think of competitive minimalists and six-word memoirs. Perhaps the moral of the story, fitting in the Twitter age, is that the great man theory of authorship so often gets it wrong; the most memorable stories and ideas can arise spontaneously, anonymously, from anywhere.

Ernest Hemingway’s Very First Published Stories, Free as an eBook

18 (Free) Books Ernest Hemingway Wished He Could Read Again for the First Time

Download 55 Free Online Literature Courses: From Dante and Milton to Kerouac and Tolkien

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 25 ) |

Irish Navy Builds Ships Named After Samuel Beckett & James Joyce

in Literature | March 19th, 2015

It’s how things go around here. You do some research on Samuel Beckett’s plays (see post from earlier today) and you discover there’s a naval ship dedicated to the Irish playwright. Launched in November 2013 and commissioned in May 2014, LÉ Samuel Beckett (P61) patrols Irish waters, allowing the Irish navy to conduct search and rescue operations, undertake vessel boardings, and also protect fisheries. According to an Irish site, the ship “represents an updated and lengthened version of the original RÓISÍN Class OPVs… She is built to the highest international standards in terms of safety, equipment fit, technological innovation and crew comfort.” The cost, 56 million euros.

Of course, the Irish haven’t forgotten their other great literary son. LÉ James Joyce (P62) will be launched in May 2015. And guess what, LÉ Seamus Heaney may soon be on the horizon.

Does anyone know of another nation that honors its artists in such a way?

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

The Books Samuel Beckett Read and Really Liked (1941–1956)

in Books, Literature | March 18th, 2015

Samuel Beckett, Pic, 1″ by Roger Pic. Via Wikimedia Commons

Clad in a black turtleneck and with a shock of white hair, Samuel Beckett was a gaunt, gloomy high priest of modernism. After the 1955 premiere of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot (watch him stage a performance here), Kenneth Tynan quipped, ”It has no plot, no climax, no denouement; no beginning, no middle and no end.” From there, Beckett’s work only got more austere, bleak and despairing. His 1969 play Breath, for instance, runs just a minute long and features just the sound of breathing.

An intensely private man, he managed to mesmerize the public even as he turned away from the limelight. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1969, his wife Suzanne, fearing the onslaught of fame that the award would bring, decried it as a “catastrophe.”

A recently published collection of his letters from 1941–1956, the period leading up to his international success with his play Waiting for Godot, casts some light on at least one corner of the man’s private life – what books were piling up on his bed stand. Below is an annotated list of what he was reading during that time. Not surprisingly, he really dug Albert Camus’s The Stranger. “Try and read it,” he writes. “I think it is important.” He dismisses Agatha Christie’s Crooked House as “very tired Christie” but praises Around the World in 80 Days, “It is lively stuff.” But the book he reserves the most praise for is J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. “I liked it very much indeed, more than anything for a long time.”

You can see the full list below. It was originally published online by Cambridge University Press in 2011. Books with an asterisk next to the title can be found in our collection of 700 Free eBooks.

Andromaque* by Jean Racine: “I read Andromaque again with greater admiration than ever and I think more understanding, at least more understanding of the chances of the theatre today.”

Around the World in 80 Days* by Jules Verne: “It is lively stuff.”

The Castle by Franz Kafka: “I felt at home, too much so – perhaps that is what stopped me from reading on. Case closed there and then.”

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger: “I liked it very much indeed, more than anything for a long time.”

Crooked House by Agatha Christie: “very tired Christie”

Effi Briest* by Theodor Fontane: “I read it for the fourth time the other day with the same old tears in the same old places.”

The Hunchback of Notre Dame* by Victor Hugo

Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Lautreamont and Sade by Maurice Blanchot: “Some excellent ideas, or rather starting-points for ideas, and a fair bit of verbiage, to be read quickly, not as a translator does. What emerges from it though is a truly gigantic Sade, jealous of Satan and of his eternal torments, and confronting nature more than with humankind.”

Man’s Fate by Andre Malraux

Mosquitoes by William Faulkner: “with a preface by Queneau that would make an ostrich puke”

The Stranger by Albert Camus: “Try and read it, I think it is important.”

The Temptation to Exist by Emil Cioran: “Great stuff here and there. Must reread his first.”

La 628-E8* by Octave Mirbeau: “Damned good piece of work.”

via Cambridge University Press

Monsterpiece Theater Presents Waiting for Elmo, Calls BS on Samuel Beckett

Rare Audio: Samuel Beckett Reads Two Poems From His Novel Watt

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. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

Jorge Luis Borges Selects 74 Books for Your Personal Library

in Books, Literature | March 10th, 2015

“Jorge Luis Borges 1951, by Grete Stern” by Grete Stern (1904–1999). Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Jorge Luis Borges’ terse, mind-expanding stories reshaped modern fiction. He was one of the first authors to mix high culture with low, merging such popular genres as science fiction and the detective story with heady philosophical discourses on authorship, reality and existence. His story “The Garden of the Forking Paths,” which describes a novel that is also a labyrinth, presaged the hypertextuality of the internet age. His tone of ironic detachment influenced generations of Latin American authors. The BBC argued that Borges was the most important writer of the 20th century.

Of course, Borges wasn’t just an author. When not writing fiction, Borges worked as a literary critic, occasional film critic, a librarian, and, for a spell, as the director of the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires. His tastes were famously eclectic. He did not think of much of canonical writers like Goethe, Jane Austen, James Joyce and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He favored the 19th storytellers like Edgar Allan Poe and Rudyard Kipling.

In 1985, Argentine publisher Hyspamerica asked Borges to create A Personal Library — which involved curating 100 great works of literature and writing introductions for each volume. Though he only got through 74 books before he died of liver cancer in 1988, Borges’s selections are fascinating and deeply idiosyncratic. He listed adventure tales by Robert Louis Stevenson and H.G. Wells alongside exotic holy books, 8th century Japanese poetry and the musing of Kierkegaard. You can see the full list below. A number of the selected works can be found in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections.

1. Stories by Julio Cortázar (not sure if this refers to Hopscotch, Blow-Up and Other Stories, or neither)
2. & 3. The Apocryphal Gospels
4. Amerika and The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka
5. The Blue Cross: A Father Brown Mystery by G.K. Chesterton
6. & 7. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
8. The Intelligence of Flowers by Maurice Maeterlinck
9. The Desert of the Tartars by Dino Buzzati
10. Peer Gynt and Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen
11. The Mandarin: And Other Stories by Eça de Queirós
12. The Jesuit Empire by Leopoldo Lugones
13. The Counterfeiters by André Gide
14. The Time Machine and The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
15. The Greek Myths by Robert Graves
16. & 17. Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
18. Mathematics and the Imagination by Edward Kasner
19. The Great God Brown and Other Plays, Strange Interlude, and Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O’Neill
20. Tales of Ise by Ariwara no Narihara
21. Benito Cereno, Billy Budd, and Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville
22. The Tragic Everyday, The Blind Pilot, and Words and Blood by Giovanni Papini
23. The Three Impostors
24. Songs of Songs tr. by Fray Luis de León
25. An Explanation of the Book of Job tr. by Fray Luis de León
26. The End of the Tether and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
27. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
28. Essays & Dialogues by Oscar Wilde
29. Barbarian in Asia by Henri Michaux
30. The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
31. Buried Alive by Arnold Bennett
32. On the Nature of Animals by Claudius Elianus
33. The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen
34. The Temptation of St. Antony by Gustave Flaubert
35. Travels by Marco Polo
36. Imaginary lives by Marcel Schwob
37. Caesar and Cleopatra, Major Barbara, and Candide by George Bernard Shaw
38. Macus Brutus and The Hour of All by Francisco de Quevedo
39. The Red Redmaynes by Eden Phillpotts
40. Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard
41. The Golem by Gustav Meyrink
42. The Lesson of the Master, The Figure in the Carpet, and The Private Life by Henry James
43. & 44. The Nine Books of the History of Herodotus by Herdotus
45. Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
46. Tales by Rudyard Kipling
47. Vathek by William Beckford
48. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
49. The Professional Secret & Other Texts by Jean Cocteau
50. The Last Days of Emmanuel Kant and Other Stories by Thomas de Quincey
51. Prologue to the Work of Silverio Lanza by Ramon Gomez de la Serna
52. The Thousand and One Nights
53. New Arabian Nights and Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson
54. Salvation of the Jews, The Blood of the Poor, and In the Darkness by Léon Bloy
55. The Bhagavad Gita and The Epic of Gilgamesh
56. Fantastic Stories by Juan José Arreola
57. Lady into Fox, A Man in the Zoo, and The Sailor’s Return by David Garnett
58. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
59. Literary Criticism by Paul Groussac
60. The Idols by Manuel Mujica Láinez
61. The Book of Good Love by Juan Ruiz
62. Complete Poetry by William Blake
63. Above the Dark Circus by Hugh Walpole
64. Poetical Works by Ezequiel Martinez Estrada
65. Tales by Edgar Allan Poe
66. The Aeneid by Virgil
67. Stories by Voltaire
68. An Experiment with Time by J.W. Dunne
69. An Essay on Orlando Furioso by Atilio Momigliano
70. & 71. The Varieties of Religious Experience and The Study of Human Nature by William James
72. Egil’s Saga by Snorri Sturluson
73. The Book of the Dead
74. & 75. The Problem of Time by J. Alexander Gunn

As you will observe, Borges’ list is very short on books by women writers. As a counter-offering, you might want to explore this list: 74 Essential Books for Your Personal Library: A List Curated by Female Creatives.

Jorge Luis Borges’ 1967–8 Norton Lectures On Poetry (And Everything Else Literary)

Jorge Luis Borges’ Favorite Short Stories (Read 7 Free Online)

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. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 30 ) |

The Visual Art of William S. Burroughs: Book Covers, Portraits, Collage, Shotgun Art & More

in Art, Literature | March 10th, 2015

As an artist, William S. Burroughs was undoubtedly his own man, beholden to no particular aesthetic, movement, or school, always independent even as a frequent collaborator with many other notable writers and artists. It didn’t hurt that he came from money—Burroughs’ grandfather invented the adding machine, and the writer’s inheritance, writes the Daily Beast, “left the young scion free to pursue education and drugs at his leisure.” Yet, although he pursued the latter without reservation, he also worked harder than most of his contemporaries, constantly innovating and pursuing new paths. Burroughs’ “entire creative project,” writes blogger Dan Shelalevy, “encompassed art, graphics, calligraphy, type, photography, film, assemblage, poetry, spoken word, and music…. Culture itself was his medium.”

He may be associated primarily with the Beats, but Burroughs himself rejected the label, saying, “We’re not doing at all the same thing, either in writing or in outlook.” As a visual artist, London’s October Gallery informs us, he “collaborated with Keith Haring, George Condo, Robert Rauschenberg, and others.” As in his writing, Burroughs experimented throughout his art career with collage, incorporating photographs and pop culture ephemera like comic strips and advertising into paintings richly textured—as in the thick impasto surrounding the portrait of Samuel Beckett above—and often violent, as below.

The notorious gun enthusiast often blasted holes through his canvasses and even experimented with shotgun painting. (See him with his shotgun below, on the front page of a Times article covering a 2005 exhibit of his work.) Burroughs also incorporated gun imagery into his paintings—often made on slabs of plywood—and used pop art techniques like stencils and spray paint, as below.

Burroughs even designed his own book covers, as you can see at the top of the post in the relatively austere paperback covers for Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine, both featuring repeating patterns of symbols. His visual art reflects the same obsessions we find in all of his work. These recurring motifs are what Paul Pieroni, co-organizer of the 2005 gallery show at The Riflemaker gallery in London, describes as a “hetero-ontology of forces at work,” including the “central themes” of “vice, violence and passion.”

The same imagery that recurs in hallucinatory novels like Junky, Naked Lunch, and The Western Lands appears in the writer’s artwork: “thus, as in his literature,” says Pieroni, “we find war, cocks, violence, dirt, parasites, guns—junk.” In Burroughs’ hands the detritus of American culture—the contents of advertisements, foreign policy briefs, and seedy motel rooms—takes on an ominous, mythic significance that shows us as much about ourselves as it does about the artist.

William S. Burroughs Shows You How to Make “Shotgun Art”

William S. Burroughs on the Art of Cut-up Writing

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh & Other Arists Tell Their Musical Stories in the Animated Video Series, “California Inspires Me”

in Animation, Creativity, Literature, Music | March 6th, 2015

I’ve lived all of my life in various cities on the East Coast, north and south. Various cultural and geographic features of the mid-Atlantic have shaped me in ways I’m probably only partially aware of. But this past summer I spent more time on the West Coast—L.A. to be precise—than I ever have before, and I found it completely refreshing. Of course, mass commerce being what it is, no matter where you go in the U.S., you run smack into a Target, usually flanked by strips of other tediously familiar chains. But instead of the towering pines of my current locale, I gazed up at languid palm fronds, and instead of the typical East Coast swelter, I relished the arid heat and the faint ocean tang in the air. A change in climate changes one’s perceptions of the world, and that’s not even to mention my—admittedly superficial—tourist’s appreciation of myriad architectural, culinary, and other SoCal eccentricities.

On returning and settling back into the grind, I still felt the pull westward, toward L.A.’s weirdness. This is unsurprising—it’s a city, and a state, that have always symbolized escapism, as well as disappointment, whether that of the Joads, Norma Desmond, or countless real anonymous hopefuls. The story of moving west in pursuit of some American Dream is as old as Lewis and Clark and as new as Devo, one of whose founding members, native Californian Mark Mothersbaugh, narrates above his journey to Hollywood with his bandmates after college at Kent State (at the top of the post). He begins with some formative childhood experiences—getting his first pair of glasses in 2nd grade (Mothersbaugh is legally blind), seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. He then tells, in brief, the story of Devo vs. the record company, or how a quirky art-rock band co-opted Madison Avenue strategies to “tell the good news of de-evolution,” only to themselves become a commodity after scoring a hit with “Whip It.”

The video is part of a series called “California Inspires Me,” a collaboration between Google Play and California Sunday magazine. Beneath Mothersbaugh’s animated story, see one from filmmaker and artist Mike Mills, who talks about skateboarding and punk rock in his L.A. youth. In the video above, singer/songwriter Thao Nguyen shares her “really deep appreciation for the history of San Francisco in music.” And below, Jack Black relates his experiences growing up in the “deep, deep South” of Southern California, specifically Hermosa Beach, with its surf culture, and “free-wheeling hippie love.” If there’s one thing that ties all four videos together—besides the music by Shannon Ferguson—it’s the mellow personalities of the four Californian artists. Watching the series from my currently blustery winter climate gave me the East Coast jitters, firing up that urge again to hit the dusty trail and revisit, or maybe relocate to the Sunshine State.

The Mastermind of Devo, Mark Mothersbaugh, Shows Off His Synthesizer Collection

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch a 1953 Animation of James Thurber’s “Unicorn in the Garden,” Voted One of the Best Animations Ever

in Animation, Literature, Magazines | March 3rd, 2015

Humorist James Thurber never tired of subjecting puny male milquetoasts to powerful female bullies.

In his view, members of the fairer sex were never femme fatales or fussy matrons, but rather battle-loving warriors in simple Wilma Flintstone-esque frocks. They are immune to the traditionally feminine concerns of the period—hair, children, the living room drapes… they get their pleasure dominating Walter Mitty and his ilk.

(Was he terrified of Woman? Resentful of her? The story he stuck to was that he’d conceived of his comic portrayal for the sole purpose of “egging her on.”)

There is one memorable instance where the little guy was allowed to come out on top. “The Unicorn in the Garden” is a story first published in The New Yorker on October 31, 1939. No spoilers, but there’s a close resemblance to Harvey, Mary Chase’s much-produced play about a mild-mannered gent whose devotion to a 6’ tall invisible rabbit drives his domineering sister around the bend.

The 1953 cartoon adaptation above brought Thurber’s drawings to life, whilst preserving the dialogue of the original in its entirety. The original story was published with only a single illustration, but director William T. Hurtz’s had hundreds of New Yorker cartoons to draw upon. Legend has it that Hurtz purposefully assigned some of United Productions of America’s least gifted animators to the project, hoping to duplicate Thurber’s ”nice, lumpy look.” The plan was for “The Unicorn in the Garden” to be part of a full-length Thurber feature, but alas, the studio pulled the plug on Men, Women and Dogs before it could be completed. Moral: Don’t count your boobies until they are hatched.

“A Unicorn in the Garden” was later voted #48 of the 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time by members of the animation field. You can find more literary animations in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

20 Animations of Classic Literary Works: From Plato and Dostoevsky, to Kafka, Hemingway & Bradbury

New Yorker Cartoon Editor Bob Mankoff Reveals the Secret of a Successful New Yorker Cartoon

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hysterical Literature: Art & Sexuality Collide in Readings of Whitman, Emerson & Other Greats (NSFW)

The (Urban) Legend of Ernest Hemingway’s Six-Word Story: “For sale, Baby shoes, Never worn.”

Irish Navy Builds Ships Named After Samuel Beckett & James Joyce

The Books Samuel Beckett Read and Really Liked (1941–1956)

Jorge Luis Borges Selects 74 Books for Your Personal Library

The Visual Art of William S. Burroughs: Book Covers, Portraits, Collage, Shotgun Art & More

Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh & Other Arists Tell Their Musical Stories in the Animated Video Series, “California Inspires Me”

Watch a 1953 Animation of James Thurber’s “Unicorn in the Garden,” Voted One of the Best Animations Ever

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