We’re lucky to have Anne Frank’s diary — lucky that the diary was ever discovered, and lucky, too, that someone took a chance on publishing the eventual bestseller. This is all nicely outlined by Francine Prose, who has a new book out called Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife. You can listen to her full book talk here. And also be sure to see our recent post showing the only existing video of Anne Frank. It’s now online.
Plagiarism Software Discovers New Shakespeare Play
Or so that’s the claim of Brian Vickers, a professor at the Institute of English Studies at the University of London. According to a short piece in The New York Times, a software package called Pl@giarism, usually used to detect cheating students, demonstrates that “The Reign of King Edward III,” a play published anonymously in 1596, has elements of Shakespeare’s linguistic fingerprint. In short, phrases used in the play match phrases found in earlier Shakespeare plays at least 200 times. Interestingly, the software also identifies phrases matching the linguistic fingerprint of another playwright, Thomas Kyd, suggesting that Shakespeare didn’t write the Edward play (or other plays?) alone. The Times of London has more on these new claims.
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Goethe and Shakespeare on Google
What Did Shakespeare Really Look Like
James Ellroy on Re-Writing History
James Ellroy’s new crime fiction novel, Blood’s a Rover, takes you back to the tumultuous summer of 1968, to a world inhabited by J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, the Black Panthers, and the mob running their rackets in the Dominican Republic. Above, in his own inimitable style, Ellroy gives you the scoop on how he goes about writing historical fiction. To get a feel for the book, you can read a PDF of the first chapter here. And if you want to get the audio book for free, check out Audible.com’s standing offer.
via Media Bistro
Who is Herta Muller?
This morning, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to the Romanian author, Herta Muller. There’s a good chance that you’re not familiar with her work. So let me steer you to this profile in the Telegraph. You can also read this excerpted interview that goes back to 1999. If I come across any media featuring Muller (so far, not much is coming up), I will post it as the day goes on.
Nabokov Makes Editorial Improvements to Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”
Vladimir Nabokov admired Franz Kafka’s novella, “The Metamorphosis.” Hence the lecture that Nabokov dedicated to the work here. But he also saw some small ways to improve the story, or at least the English translation of it. Above, we have some edits that Nabokov penned himself. And, just as an fyi, you can download a free versions of Kafka’s work in our collections of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.
The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats
Portrait of William Butler Yeats by John Singer Sargent, via Wikimedia Commons
It’s a happy trend. Increasingly, we’re seeing museums launching dynamic online exhibitions to accompany their exhibitions on the ground. In the past, we highlighted the Tate Modern’s panoramic tour of Mark Rothko’s work. And now we point you to The Life and Work of William Butler Yeats, an online exhibition created by The National Library of Ireland. When you enter the tour, you can scan through 200 artifacts & manuscripts and “attend” three in-depth tutorials exploring the evolution of three major poems (‘Sailing to Byzantium’, ‘Leda and the Swan’ and ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’). You can also listen to Yeats, one of Ireland’s towering poets, reciting his famous poem ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree.’ To listen, click “Areas” on the bottom navigation, then click “Verse and Vision” on the center menu, and then the audio will begin to play. You can read the text of the poem here. Finally, you’ll find more Yeats poems in our Free Audio Book collection.
The Edgar Allan Poe Digital Collection
A quick note: The Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, is commemorating the 2009 bicentennial of Edgar Allan Poe, American poet, critic and inventor of the detective story, with the exhibition “From Out That Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe.” To mark the occasion, the Center’s web site has launched The Edgar Allan Poe Digital Collection, and it nicely features Poe’s manuscripts, his letters and documents, photographs and even cryptographs that Poe liked to solve. (You can try to solve them too.) Have a look, and then feel free to download readings of Poe’s work in our collection of Free Audio Books.
“September 1, 1939” by W.H. Auden
The poem was W.H. Auden’s. The date marked the moment when Germany invaded Poland, initiating the start of World War II. “September 1, 1939” was originally published in The New Republic on October 18, 1939. You can find the text of the poem here. Plus, you can also read George Orwell’s account of what happened that historic day in Poland. I found it, and just had to throw that in.
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