Take a Virtual Tour of the Dictionary Shakespeare May Have Owned and Annotated

in History, Literature | April 24th, 2014

 

shakespeare dictionary

You sure­ly heard plen­ty about Shake­speare’s birth­day yes­ter­day. But did you hear about Shake­speare’s bee­hive? No, the Bard did­n’t moon­light as an api­arist, though in his main line of work as a poet and drama­tist he sure­ly had to con­sult his dic­tio­nary fair­ly often. The ques­tion of whether human­i­ty has an iden­ti­fi­able copy of such an illus­tri­ous ref­er­ence vol­ume gets explored in the new book Shake­speare’s Bee­hive: An Anno­tat­ed Eliz­a­bethan Dic­tio­nary Comes to Light by book­seller-schol­ars George Kop­pel­man and Daniel Wech­sler. In their study, they reveal that they may have come into pos­ses­sion of Shake­speare’s very own copy of Baret’s Alvearie, a pop­u­lar clas­si­cal quote-laden Eng­lish-Latin-Greek-French dic­tio­nary the man who wrote King Lear would have found “the per­fect tool, a hon­ey-combed bee­hive of pos­si­bil­i­ties that may not have formed his way of think­ing, but cer­tain­ly fed his appetite and nour­ished his selec­tion.” He would have, at least, if indeed he owned it. Some sol­id Shake­speare schol­ar­ship points toward his own­ing a copy of Baret’s Alvearie, but did he own this one, the rich­ly anno­tat­ed one these guys found on eBay?

Experts haven’t exact­ly stepped for­ward in force to back up their claim. Plau­si­ble objec­tions include, as Adam Gop­nik puts it in a (sub­scribers-only) New York­er piece on this Alvearie in par­tic­u­lar and human­i­ty’s desire for Shake­speare­an arti­facts in gen­er­al: “the hand­writ­ing just does­n’t look like Shake­speare’s,” “since Shake­speare wrote Eliz­a­bethan Eng­lish, any work of Eliz­a­bethan Eng­lish is going to con­tain echoes of Shake­speare,” and, of all pos­si­ble anno­ta­tors of this par­tic­u­lar phys­i­cal book, Shake­speare “is a prime can­di­date only because we don’t know the names of all the oth­er bird-lov­ing, inquis­i­tive read­ers who also liked their dabchicks and their French verbs.” Still, in a strik­ing act of open­ness, Kop­pel­man and Wech­sler have made their — and Shake­speare’s? — Alvearie avail­able for your dig­i­tal perusal on their site. You have to reg­is­ter as a mem­ber first, but then you can draw your own con­clu­sions about Kop­pel­man and Weschler’s dis­cov­ery — or, as even they call it, their “leap of faith.” Over­en­thu­si­as­tic words, per­haps, but sel­dom do either suc­cess­ful anti­quar­i­an book deal­ers or ded­i­cat­ed Shake­speare fans lack enthu­si­asm.

via The Atlantic

Relat­ed  Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er What Shakespeare’s Hand­writ­ing Looked Like, and How It Solved a Mys­tery of Author­ship

What Shake­speare Sound­ed Like to Shake­speare: Recon­struct­ing the Bard’s Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

Read All of Shakespeare’s Plays Free Online, Cour­tesy of the Fol­ger Shake­speare Library

Free Online Shake­speare Cours­es: Primers on the Bard from Oxford, Har­vard, Berke­ley & More

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.

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H.G. Wells Interviews Joseph Stalin in 1934; Declares “I Am More to The Left Than You, Mr. Stalin”

in History, Literature | April 23rd, 2014

wells and stalin

From the 20/20 point of view of the present, Joseph Stal­in was one of the 20th century’s great mon­sters. He ter­ri­fied the Sovi­et Union with cam­paign after cam­paign of polit­i­cal purges, he moved whole pop­u­la­tions into Siberia and he arguably killed more peo­ple than Hitler. But it took decades for the scope of his crimes to get out, most­ly because, unlike Hitler, Stal­in stuck to killing his own peo­ple.

In ear­ly 1930s, how­ev­er, Stal­in was con­sid­ered by many to be the leader of the future. That peri­od was, of course, the nadir of the Great Depres­sion. Cap­i­tal­ism seemed to be com­ing apart at the seams. The USSR promised a new soci­ety ruled not by the oli­garchs of Wall Street but by the peo­ple — a soci­ety where every­one was equal.

H.G. Wells inter­viewed Stal­in in Moscow in 1934 for the mag­a­zine The New States­man. Wells was an avowed social­ist and one of the left’s most influ­en­tial authors. His first nov­el, The Time Machine, is essen­tial­ly an alle­go­ry for class strug­gle after all. The inter­view between the two is fas­ci­nat­ing.

Wells opens the piece by stat­ing that he speaks for the com­mon peo­ple. While that point is debat­able — Stal­in calls him out on that asser­tion – Wells does speak in a man­ner that is read­i­ly under­stand­able. Stal­in, in con­trast, speaks in flu­ent Polit­buro. The bland­ness of his speech, choked with Com­mu­nist boil­er­plate, seems designed to make the lis­ten­er tune out. But then he drops lit­tle bon mots into his mono­logues that hint at the vio­lence he has unleashed on his coun­try. Take this line for instance:

Rev­o­lu­tion, the sub­sti­tu­tion of one social sys­tem for anoth­er, has always been a strug­gle, a painful and a cru­el strug­gle, a life-and-death strug­gle.

It’s a chill­ing line. Espe­cial­ly when you con­sid­er that at the time of this inter­view, Stal­in was just start­ing to launch his first wave of polit­i­cal purges and he was plot­ting to assas­si­nate his main polit­i­cal rival Sergei Kirov.

As the inter­view unfolds, you can imag­ine Wells grow­ing increas­ing­ly frus­trat­ed by Stalin’s nar­row, dog­mat­ic view of the world. The Sovi­et leader, as Wells lat­er wrote in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, “has lit­tle of the quick uptake of Pres­i­dent Roo­sevelt and none of the sub­tle­ty and tenac­i­ty of Lenin. … His was not a free impul­sive brain nor a sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly orga­nized brain; it was a trained Lenin­ist-Marx­ist brain.”

At sev­er­al points in the inter­view Wells chal­lenges Stal­in: “I object to this sim­pli­fied clas­si­fi­ca­tion of mankind into poor and rich,” the author fumes.

And when Stal­in doesn’t agree with Wells that the Cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem was on its last legs, the author actu­al­ly chides him for not being rev­o­lu­tion­ary enough. “It seems to me that I am more to the Left than you, Mr. Stal­in; I think the old sys­tem is near­er to its end than you think.” Now that’s chutz­pah.

In the end, the inter­view presents a duel­ing ver­sion of the future of the left. Wells believed, in essence, that the Cap­i­tal­ist world only need­ed to be reformed, albeit dras­ti­cal­ly, to achieve eco­nom­ic jus­tice. And Stal­in argued that Cap­i­tal­ism had to be torn down com­plete­ly before any oth­er reform could take place.

In spite of their dif­fer­ences, Wells left the inter­view with a pos­i­tive impres­sion of the Sovi­et leader. “I have nev­er met a man more fair, can­did, and hon­est,” he wrote.

Wells died in 1946 before the worst of Stalin’s crimes became known to the out­side world. Stal­in died in 1953.  Fol­low­ing a stroke, his body remained on the floor in a pool of urine for hours before a doc­tor was called. His min­ions were ter­ri­fied that he might wake up and order their exe­cu­tion.

You can read the entire inter­view between H.G. Wells and Stal­in on The New States­men’s web­site here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Joseph Stal­in, a Life­long Edi­tor, Wield­ed a Big, Blue, Dan­ger­ous Pen­cil

How to Spot a Com­mu­nist Using Lit­er­ary Crit­i­cism: A 1955 Man­u­al from the U.S. Mil­i­tary

Leon Trot­sky: Love, Death and Exile in Mex­i­co

Learn Russ­ian from our List of Free Lan­guage Lessons

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.

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Sylvia Plath Annotates Her Copy of The Great Gatsby

in Literature | April 23rd, 2014

gatsbyedited

The true fan of a writer desires not just that writer’s com­plete works, even if they all come signed and in first edi­tions. No — the enthu­si­ast most ded­i­cat­ed to their lit­er­ary lumi­nary of choice must have, in addi­tion, the books writ­ten by that author, those owned by that author, prefer­ably anoint­ed with lib­er­al quan­ti­ties of reveal­ing mar­gin­a­lia. In the case of such rel­a­tive­ly recent­ly deceased writ­ers as David Mark­son, the whole of whose well-anno­tat­ed per­son­al library got donat­ed to The Strand short­ly after his pass­ing, you can some­times actu­al­ly come to pos­sess such trea­sures. In the case of poet Sylvia Plath, part of a page of whose copy of F. Scott Fitzger­ald’s The Great Gats­by you see above, you might have a trick­i­er time get­ting your hands on them. Justin Ray’s post at Com­plex, which quotes Plath as call­ing Fitzger­ald “a word painter with a vivid palette” who choos­es words with “jew­el-cut pre­ci­sion,” has more on the book and its mark­ings.

“Plath stud­ied a crap-ton of lit­er­a­ture in school,” Ray writes. “It isn’t imme­di­ate­ly clear whether she was in high school or col­lege when she anno­tat­ed Gats­by,” but when­ev­er she did it, she under­lined “Daisy’s pre­dic­tion of what her daugh­ter will be like” with the word “L’Ennui,” a word she would use to name an ear­ly poem that reflects “a post roman­ti­cism and the death of ide­al­ism, two ideas also in Gats­by, accord­ing to an essay by Anna Jour­ney.” Else­where, you can also read “Princess Daisy,” Park Buck­er’s piece on Plath’s anno­tat­ed Gats­by. “The vol­ume rep­re­sents a fas­ci­nat­ing piece of evi­dence of Fitzgerald’s ris­ing rep­u­ta­tion and influ­ence in the ear­ly 1950s, as well as the aca­d­e­m­ic back­ground and tastes of a major Amer­i­can poet,” writes Buck­er. “Although Sylvia Plath and F. Scott Fitzger­ald rarely inhab­it the same sen­tence, their asso­ci­a­tion should not appear strained. A young, intense poet would nat­u­ral­ly be drawn to the lyric qual­i­ty of Fitzgerald’s prose.” And just imag­ine its val­ue to die-hard fans of both of those trag­ic pil­lars of Amer­i­can let­ters — a group in which, if you’ve read this post and every­thing to which it links, you should per­haps con­sid­er count­ing your­self.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Sylvia Plath Read Fif­teen Poems From Her Final Col­lec­tion, Ariel, in 1962 Record­ing

See F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Hand­writ­ten Man­u­scripts for The Great Gats­by, This Side of Par­adise & More

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Trans­lates The Great Gats­by, the Nov­el That Influ­enced Him Most

83 Years of Great Gats­by Book Cov­er Designs: A Pho­to Gallery

Read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gats­by & Oth­er Major Works Free Online

Gertrude Stein Sends a “Review” of The Great Gats­by to F. Scott Fitzger­ald (1925)

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.

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Close Personal Friend: Watch a 1996 Portrait of Gen‑X Definer Douglas Coupland

in Film, Literature, Technology | April 22nd, 2014

Whether we lived through them as kids or as grown-ups, few of us feel sure about whether we miss the 1990s. No gen­er­a­tion did more to define the decade before last, at least in the West, than the unmoored, irony-lov­ing, at once deeply cyn­i­cal and deeply earnest “Gen­er­a­tion X” that suc­ceed­ed the wealth­i­er, more influ­en­tial Baby Boomers. No writer did more to define that gen­er­a­tion than Dou­glas Cou­p­land, the Cana­di­an nov­el­ist, visu­al artist, and seer of the imme­di­ate future whose 1991 lit­er­ary debut Gen­er­a­tion X: Tales for an Accel­er­at­ed Cul­ture gave the cohort its name. There he wrote of the twen­tysome­things who lived through the 1990s def­i­nite­ly not as kids, yet, frus­trat­ing­ly, not quite as grown-ups, com­ing hap­less­ly to grips in the mar­gins of a human expe­ri­ence that an advanced civ­i­liza­tion had already begun detach­ing from sup­posed expec­ta­tions — jobs, hous­es, sta­bil­i­ty, tight con­nec­tion between mind and body, unques­tion­ably “real” lived expe­ri­ence — of gen­er­a­tions before.

Cou­p­land, also a pro­lif­ic sculp­tor (next time you get to his home­town of Van­cou­ver, do vis­it the some­how always strik­ing Dig­i­tal Orca), writer of the film Every­thing’s Gone Green, star of the doc­u­men­tary Sou­venir of Cana­da, and now the devel­op­er of a snor­ing-assis­tance smart­phone app, knows a thing or two about switch­ing media. Five years after break­ing out with Gen­er­a­tion X, he also made Close Per­son­al Friend, the not-quite-cat­e­go­riz­able short about tech­nol­o­gy, mem­o­ry, and iden­ti­ty at the top of the post. In what plays as a cross between a Chris Mark­er-style essay film and a mid­dle-peri­od MTV music video, Cou­p­land con­tin­ues his career-long rumi­na­tion about our “accel­er­at­ed cul­ture” and the fas­ci­nat­ing­ly empow­ered yet com­pro­mised human beings to which it gives rise. What does it mean in this mod­ern, hyper­me­di­at­ed con­text, he won­ders, that we now won­der whether we actu­al­ly have lives? “Not hav­ing a life is so com­mon,” he says. “It’s almost become the norm. […] Peo­ple just aren’t get­ting their year’s worth of year any­more.”

Giv­en our cul­ture’s fur­ther accel­er­a­tion since he spoke those words in 1996 — the world wide web as we know it hav­ing got its start just three years before — Cou­p­land’s thoughts on the sub­ject, whether expressed in fic­tion, through sculp­ture, or onscreen, still sound plen­ty rel­e­vant. Close Per­son­al Friend, with its void­like back­drops, video-blender edit­ing, and scat­tered clips of whole­some mid­cen­tu­ry Amer­i­cana, bears the aes­thet­ic mark of its era. Cou­p­land’s faint­ly omi­nous talk of “FedEx, Prozac, microwave ovens, and fax machines” also time-stamps it tech­no­log­i­cal­ly and cul­tur­al­ly. But the obser­va­tions have car­ried through, only grow­ing sharp­er, to his lat­est work. Asked to imag­ine the “two dom­i­nant activ­i­ties” of life twen­ty years hence, the Cou­p­land of 1996 names “going shop­ping and going to jail,” pur­suits he sees as now merged in his essay col­lec­tion pub­lished last year, Shop­ping in Jail. Just above, we have a half-hour con­ver­sa­tion between Cou­p­land and Q host Jian Ghome­shi about his even new­er book, a study of mis­an­thropy in nov­el form called Worst. Per­son. Ever. In the talk, he cites “I miss my pre-inter­net brain,” a slo­gan he made up that has gained much trac­tion in recent years. But does he real­ly? “No,” he admits. “It was bor­ing back then!” Close Per­son­al Friend will be added to our col­lec­tion of 675 Free Movies Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Free Online: Richard Linklater’s Slack­er, the Clas­sic Gen‑X Indie Film

The Always-NSFW Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes Catch Up in Jay and Silent Bob Get Old Pod­cast

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.

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Kurt Vonnegut Urges Young People to Make Art and “Make Your Soul Grow”

in Creativity, K-12, Letters, Literature | April 19th, 2014

Art not only saves lives, it casts rip­ples, as Kurt Von­negut sure­ly knew when he replied—at length—to five New York City high school stu­dents who’d con­tact­ed him as part of a 2006 Eng­lish assign­ment.  (The iden­ti­ties of the oth­er authors select­ed for this hon­or are lost to time, but not one had the cour­tesy to respond except Von­negut.)

Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lock­wood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Bat­ten, Mau­r­er and Con­gius­ta:

I thank you for your friend­ly let­ters. You sure know how to cheer up a real­ly old geezer (84) in his sun­set years. I don’t make pub­lic appear­ances any more because I now resem­ble noth­ing so much as an igua­na.

What I had to say to you, more­over, would not take long, to wit: Prac­tice any art, music, singing, danc­ing, act­ing, draw­ing, paint­ing, sculpt­ing, poet­ry, fic­tion, essays, reportage, no mat­ter how well or bad­ly, not to get mon­ey and fame, but to expe­ri­ence becom­ing, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seri­ous­ly! I mean start­ing right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a fun­ny or nice pic­ture of Ms. Lock­wood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the show­er and on and on. Make a face in your mashed pota­toes. Pre­tend you’re Count Drac­u­la.

Here’s an assign­ment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lock­wood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about any­thing, but rhymed. No fair ten­nis with­out a net. Make it as good as you pos­si­bly can. But don’t tell any­body what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to any­body, not even your girl­friend or par­ents or what­ev­er, or Ms. Lock­wood. OK?

Tear it up into tee­ny-wee­ny pieces, and dis­card them into wide­ly sep­a­rat­ed trash recep­ti­cals [sic]. You will find that you have already been glo­ri­ous­ly reward­ed for your poem. You have expe­ri­enced becom­ing, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all!

Kurt Von­negut

Von­negut’s kind wish­es and Yoko Ono-esque prompt have been wide­ly dis­sem­i­nat­ed on the Inter­net, which is no doubt where stu­dents at Hove Park School in Brighton, East Sus­sex caught the scent. Work­ing with a pro­fes­sion­al pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny that spe­cial­izes in nar­ra­tive-dri­ven work, they lit­er­al­ized  the assign­ment in the video above, and while I might have pre­ferred a sneak peek at the poems and draw­ings such a task might yield, pre-shred­ding, I loved how they acknowl­edged that not every­one heeds the call. (The cast­ing of that one could have gone either way…wouldn’t be sur­prised if you told me that that boy has a punk band that would’ve ripped Von­negut’s ears off.)

via Kate Rix

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kurt Von­negut Dia­grams the Shape of All Sto­ries in a Master’s The­sis Reject­ed by U. Chica­go

“Wear Sun­screen”: The Sto­ry Behind the Com­mence­ment Speech That Kurt Von­negut Nev­er Gave

Kurt Vonnegut’s Eight Tips on How to Write a Good Short Sto­ry

Kurt Von­negut: Where Do I Get My Ideas From? My Dis­gust with Civ­i­liza­tion

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is spend­ing tonight’s Night of Von­negut in Los Ange­les rather than her home­town of Indi­anapo­lis. So it goes. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Read 10 Short Stories by Gabriel García Márquez Free Online (Plus More Essays & Interviews)

in Literature | April 18th, 2014

Image by Fes­ti­val Inter­na­cional de Cine en Guadala­jara via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

“Our inde­pen­dence from Span­ish dom­i­na­tion did not put us beyond the reach of mad­ness,” said Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez in his 1982 Nobel Prize accep­tance speech. Gar­cía Márquez, who died yes­ter­day at the age of 87, refers of course to all of Spain’s for­mer colonies in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean, from his own Colom­bia to Cuba, the island nation whose artis­tic strug­gle to come to terms with its his­to­ry con­tributed so much to that art form gen­er­al­ly known as “mag­i­cal real­ism,” a syn­cretism of Euro­pean mod­ernism and indige­nous art and folk­lore, Catholi­cism and the rem­nants of Amerindi­an and African reli­gions.

While the term has per­haps been overused to the point of banal­i­ty in crit­i­cal and pop­u­lar appraisals of Latin-Amer­i­can writ­ers (some pre­fer Cuban nov­el­ist Ale­jo Carpentier’s lo real mar­avil­loso, “the mar­velous real”), in Marquez’s case, it’s hard to think of a bet­ter way to describe the dense inter­weav­ing of fact and fic­tion in his life’s work as a writer of both fan­tas­tic sto­ries and unflinch­ing jour­nal­is­tic accounts, both of which grap­pled with the gross hor­rors of colo­nial plun­der and exploita­tion and the sub­se­quent rule of blood­thirsty dic­ta­tors, incom­pe­tent patri­archs, venal oli­garchs, and cor­po­rate gang­sters in much of the South­ern Hemi­sphere.

Nev­er­the­less, it’s a descrip­tion that some­times seems to obscure Gar­cía Mar­quez’s great pur­pose, mar­gin­al­iz­ing his lit­er­ary vision as trendy exot­i­ca or a “post­colo­nial hang­over.” Once asked in a Paris Review inter­view the year before his Nobel win about the dif­fer­ence between the nov­el and jour­nal­ism, Gar­cía Márquez replied, “Noth­ing. I don’t think there is any dif­fer­ence. The sources are the same, the mate­r­i­al is the same, the resources and the lan­guage are the same.”

In jour­nal­ism just one fact that is false prej­u­dices the entire work. In con­trast, in fic­tion one sin­gle fact that is true gives legit­i­ma­cy to the entire work. That’s the only dif­fer­ence, and it lies in the com­mit­ment of the writer. A nov­el­ist can do any­thing he wants so long as he makes peo­ple believe in it.

Gar­cía Márquez made us believe. One would be hard-pressed to find a 20th cen­tu­ry writer more com­mit­ted to the truth, whether expressed in dense mythol­o­gy and baroque metaphor or in the dry ratio­nal­ist dis­course of the West­ern epis­teme. For its mul­ti­tude of incred­i­ble ele­ments, the 1967 nov­el for which Gar­cía Márquez is best known—One Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude—cap­tures the almost unbe­liev­able human his­to­ry of the region with more emo­tion­al and moral fideli­ty than any strict­ly fac­tu­al account: “How­ev­er bizarre or grotesque some par­tic­u­lars may be,” wrote a New York Times review­er in 1970, “Macon­do is no nev­er-nev­er land.” In fact, Gar­cía Márquez’s nov­el helped dis­man­tle the very real and bru­tal South Amer­i­can empire of banana com­pa­ny Unit­ed Fruit, a “great irony,” writes Rich Cohen, of one mythol­o­gy lay­ing bare anoth­er: “In col­lege, they call it ‘mag­i­cal real­ism,’ but, if you know his­to­ry, you under­stand it’s less mag­i­cal than just plain real, the stuff of news­pa­pers returned as lived expe­ri­ence.”

Edith Gross­man, trans­la­tor of sev­er­al of Gar­cía Márquez’s works—including Love in the Time of Cholera and his 2004 auto­bi­og­ra­phy Liv­ing to Tell the Tale (Vivir para Cotar­la)—agrees. “He doesn’t use that term at all, as far as I know,” she said in a 2005 inter­view with Guer­ni­ca’s Joel Whit­ney: “It’s always struck me as an easy, emp­ty kind of remark.” Instead, Gar­cía Márquez’s style, says Gross­man, “seemed like a way of writ­ing about the excep­tion­al­ness of so much of Latin Amer­i­ca.”

Today, in hon­or and with tremen­dous grat­i­tude for that inde­fati­ga­ble chron­i­cler of excep­tion­al lived expe­ri­ence, we offer sev­er­al online texts of Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez’s short works at the links below.

Harper­Collins’ online pre­view of Gar­cía Mar­quez’s Col­lect­ed Sto­ries includes the full text of “The Third Res­ig­na­tion,” “The Oth­er Side of Death,” “Eva Is Inside Her Cat,” “Bit­ter­ness for Three Sleep­walk­ers,” and “Dia­logue with the Mir­ror,” all from the author’s 1972 col­lec­tion Eyes of a Blue Dog (Ojos de per­ro azul).

At The New York­er, you can read Gar­cía Mar­quez’s sto­ry “The Autumn of the Patri­arch” (1976) and his 2003 auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal essay “The Chal­lenge.”

Fol­low the links below for more of Gar­cía Mar­quez’s short fic­tion from var­i­ous uni­ver­si­ty web­sites:

“Death Con­stant Beyond Love” (1970)

“The Hand­somest Drowned Man in the World” (1968)

“A Very Old Man with Enor­mous Wings” (1955)

Vis­it The Mod­ern Word for an excel­lent bio­graph­i­cal sketch of the author.

See The New York Times for “A Talk with Gabriel Gar­cia Mar­quez” in the year of his Nobel win, an essay in which he recounts his 1957 meet­ing with Ernest Hem­ing­way, and many more reviews and essays.

Final­ly, we should also men­tion that you can down­load Love in the Time of Cholera or Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude for free (as audio books) if you join Audible.com’s 30-day pro­gram. We have details on it here.

As we say farewell to one of the world’s great­est writ­ers, we can remem­ber him not only as a writer of “mag­i­cal real­ism,” what­ev­er that phrase may mean, but as a teller of com­pli­cat­ed, won­drous, and some­times painful truths, in what­ev­er form he hap­pened to find them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read 18 Short Sto­ries From Nobel Prize-Win­ning Writer Alice Munro Free Online

Read 12 Mas­ter­ful Essays by Joan Did­ion for Free Online, Span­ning Her Career From 1965 to 2013

10 Free Sto­ries by George Saun­ders, Author of Tenth of Decem­ber, “The Best Book You’ll Read This Year”

600 Free eBooks: Down­load Great Books for Free

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

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The Secret of Life and Love, According to Ray Bradbury (1968)

in Life, Literature, Writing | April 16th, 2014

“Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.” This—writes Sam Weller in his intro­duc­tion to a 2010 inter­view with sci-fi and fan­ta­sy lumi­nary Ray Brad­bury—was the author’s “life­long cre­do.” Weller writes of dis­cov­er­ing an unpub­lished Paris Review inter­view from the 1970s in Bradbury’s garage, with a note from edi­tor George Plimp­ton that read “a bit infor­mal in places, maybe over­ly enthu­si­as­tic.” The irony of this judg­ment is that it is Bradbury’s enthu­si­asm, his lack of for­mal­i­ty, which make him so com­pelling and so copi­ous a writer and speak­er. Brad­bury didn’t self-edit or sec­ond guess much—his approach is best char­ac­ter­ized as fear­less and pas­sion­ate, just as he describes his writ­ing process:

I type my first draft quick­ly, impul­sive­ly even. A few days lat­er I retype the whole thing and my sub­con­scious, as I retype, gives me new words. Maybe it’ll take retyp­ing it many times until it is done. Some­times it takes very lit­tle revi­sion.

It’s that unfet­tered expres­sion of his sub­con­scious that Brad­bury dis­cuss­es in the short clip above, in which he re-invig­o­rates all the sort of carpe diem clichés one hears so often by fram­ing them not as self-help sug­ges­tions but as imper­a­tives for a full and healthy life. Respond­ing in the moment, says Brad­bury, refus­ing to “put off till tomor­row… what I must do, right now,” allows him to “find out what my secret self needs, wants, desires with all its heart.” For Brad­bury, writ­ing is much more than a for­mal exer­cise or a spe­cial­ized craft—it is a vital expres­sion of his full human­i­ty and a means of “cleans­ing the stream” of his mind: “We belong only by doing,” he says, “and we own only by doing, and we love only by doing…. If you want an inter­pre­ta­tion of life and love, that would be the clos­est thing I could come to.”

Brad­bury doesn’t lim­it his phi­los­o­phy to the writ­ing life; he advo­cates for every­one an unabashed emo­tion­al engage­ment with the world. For him, the man (and woman, we might pre­sume), who can­not “laugh freely,” cry, or “be violent”—which he defines in sub­li­mat­ing terms as any phys­i­cal or cre­ative activity—is a “sick man.” Bradbury’s “over­ly enthu­si­as­tic” explo­rations of cre­ative pas­sion were almost as much a part of his out­put as his fic­tion. His inter­views, tele­vised and in print, are inspir­ing for this rea­son: he is nev­er coy or pre­ten­tious but push­es oth­ers to aspire to the same kind of authen­tic joy he seemed to take in every­thing he did.

By the way, the first per­son we see above is leg­endary Warn­er Bros. ani­ma­tor Chuck Jones (as one Youtube com­menter says, we get in this clip “two vision­ar­ies for the price of one”). Bradbury’s “vital­i­ty,” says Jones, “rubs off on the peo­ple who work with him.” And, he might have added, all of the peo­ple who read and lis­ten to him, too.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ray Brad­bury: “The Things That You Love Should Be Things That You Do.” “Books Teach Us That”

Ray Brad­bury: Sto­ry of a Writer 1963 Film Cap­tures the Para­dox­i­cal Late Sci-Fi Author

Ray Brad­bury Gives 12 Pieces of Writ­ing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

Ray Brad­bury: Lit­er­a­ture is the Safe­ty Valve of Civ­i­liza­tion

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

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Read Hundreds of Free Sci-Fi Stories from Asimov, Lovecraft, Bradbury, Dick, Clarke & More

in Literature, Sci Fi | April 16th, 2014

I-Mars-Bradbury

“We think audio is the best medi­um for Sci­ence Fic­tion lit­er­a­ture and dra­ma,” says the “About” page at SFFaudio.com. “We’re not against the dead tree, cath­ode ray, and cel­lu­loid ver­sions, we just know them to be the infe­ri­or medi­um for trans­mis­sion of sto­ry, mood, and ideas.” A strong posi­tion indeed, but one won­ders: what do they think of the dig­i­tal dis­play of text as a means of sci-fi con­veyance? They must har­bor more than a lit­tle love for it, giv­en that on their site, oth­er­wise a rich trove of the gen­re’s lit­er­a­ture and dra­ma in free audio form, they’ve also cul­ti­vat­ed a robust col­lec­tion of equal­ly free books and sto­ries avail­able as PDFs, many scanned straight from the orig­i­nal dead-tree mag­a­zines in which they first appeared. “The sto­ries list­ed below are, to the best of my research, all PUBLIC DOMAIN in the Unit­ed States,” writes the col­lec­tor in an intro­duc­tion to the long list, a quick scan of which reveals a who’s who of respect­ed names in sci­ence fic­tion from the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry and ear­li­er, from Piers Antho­ny to John Wyn­d­ham.

In between those two sci-fi emi­nences, you’ll also encounter a few pos­si­bly unex­pect­ed names, like Hen­ry James, Jack Lon­don, Guy de Mau­pas­sant — yes, the very same Hen­ry James, Jack Lon­don, and Guy de Mau­pas­sant, who seem to have used just enough of the adven­tur­ous and the super­nat­ur­al in their fic­tion to fit into the spir­it of the col­lec­tion, if not quite into the genre bound­aries. But even if you want to stick to sci-fi and sci-fi only, you’ll cer­tain­ly find plen­ty of the finest short­er-form work with which to treat your­self. Per­haps “I, Mars” by none oth­er than Mr. Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles him­self, Ray Brad­bury? Alter­na­tive­ly, if you pre­fer the “hard­er” side of the tra­di­tion, behold the offer­ings from Foun­da­tion series author Isaac Asi­mov:

  • “The Joke­ster” |PDF| 15 pages
  • “Let’s Get Togeth­er” |PDF| 18 pages
  • “Liv­ing Space” |PDF| 15 pages
  • “Sil­ly Ass­es” |PDF| 2 pages

Or those from Arthur C. Clarke, he of Ren­dezvous with Rama and 2001: A Space Odyssey:

  • “The Deep Range” |PDF| 10 pages
  • “The Nine Bil­lion Names Of God” |PDF| 8 pages
  • “The Par­a­site” |PDF| 12 pages
  • “Sec­ond Dawn” |PDF| 24 pages
  • “The Star” |PDF| 9 pages
  • “The Stroke Of The Sun” |PDF| 8 pages
  • “A Walk In The Dark” |PDF| 8 pages

For anoth­er vin­tage entire­ly, see also their for­mi­da­ble line­up of over forty pieces from H.G. Wells, prog­en­i­tor of so much of what we think of as sci­ence fic­tion today, which includes “The Island of Dr. More­au,” “The War of the Worlds,” and “The Time Machine.” Just about as many of the sto­ries of H.P. Love­craft, a man with a now sim­i­lar­ly clas­sic body of work but one with an entire­ly dif­fer­ent sen­si­bil­i­ty alto­geth­er, also appear. You can sam­ple his spe­cial brand of the unspeak­able in tales like “The Shunned House,” “The Name­less City,” and “The Hor­ror at Red Hook.” Then there are the works of Philip K. Dick, many of which have been aggre­gat­ed in our col­lec­tion: 33 Great Sci-Fi Sto­ries by Philip K. Dick: Down­load as Free Audio Books & Free eBooks.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

100 Great Sci-Fi Sto­ries by Women Writ­ers (Read 20 for Free Online)

Free Sci­ence Fic­tion Clas­sics on the Web: Hux­ley, Orwell, Asi­mov, Gaiman & Beyond

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

Free: Down­load 151 Sci-Fi & Fan­ta­sy Sto­ries from Tor.com

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.

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