This is surely worth a quick mention: Today we added to our list of Free Audio Books a recording of Raymond Carver reading his most famous story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Taped in a Palo Alto hotel room in 1983 for a new radio series called Tell Me a Story, it’s the only known recording of Carver reading his signature story. The reading itself starts at the 6:00 mark. Start listening here (or stream it above).
In 2009, Stephen King called Raymond Carver “surely the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the 20th century.” If you’d like to get deeper into his literary world — a literary world that explores “the dim ache in the nondescript lives of aspiring students, down-and-outers, diner waitresses, salesmen, and unhappily hitched blue-collar couples,” as Josh Jones once put it — you can refer back to a previous post where we featured Richard Ford, Anne Enright, and David Means reading several other Carver stories.
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Edgar Allan Poe was born on this day 206 years ago. BoingBoing suggests celebrating Poe’s birthday with these Vincent Price wines. But seeing that the 2012 Raven Cabernet Sauvignon runs $75.00, we’re going to steer you toward something free. If you revisit our post from October, you can download Poe’s complete works as ebooks and free audio books. Lots of great stories in one bundle. And it won’t cost you a dime. You’d have to think that Poe, who died penniless, would approve.
Find lots more literary freebies in our twin collections:
Hemingway and Faulkner, Faulkner and Hemingway…. The American literary canon has expanded so much in the past thirty years or so that it almost spans the globe, like American business, drawing in writers from every possible corner. With greater inclusion comes the passing out of fashion of many a former icon (does anyone read Dreiser or Dos Passos anymore?). And yet, no matter how much critical tastes and scholarly measures change, it seems we’ll never be able to do without our Hemingway and Faulkner.
Perhaps it’s their deep takes on history—Hemingway’s sentimental war correspondence and tragic sense of a changing Europe; Faulkner’s sense of a South held in thrall to squalid delusions of grandeur and epic colonial violence. Geopolitically relevant they still may be, but there’s much more to both than geopolitics. Perhaps it’s the timeless stylistic dialectic, or the Nobels, or the traded insults, or that the names themselves, like Roosevelt and Kennedy, trigger instant recall of the “American century.” Of course, devotees of Faulkner (I am one), of Hemingway, or of Faulkner and Hemingway need no rationale, and it is to such people principally that today’s post is addressed.
For today, we bring you Hemingway and Faulkner, reading Hemingway and Faulkner. In the Spotify playlists above (download Spotify here), we have both authors reading from their Nobel acceptance speeches, then excerpts from their literary works. These recordings were originally released as vinyl albums by Caedmon Records, that pre-audiobook phenomenon founded by Barbara Holdridge and Marianne Roney in 1952. Caedmon released albums of readings by dozens of major writers, like Dylan Thomas and Eudora Welty, and we have featured many of them here before—such as those from T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, W.H. Auden, and Tennessee Williams (reading Hart Crane). But today, it’s Hemingway and Faulkner, who despite—or because of—their differences, belong together forever as great American literary patriarchs, even if patriarchy is terminally passé.
Neil Gaiman sent Ray Bradbury a gift for what turned out to be his last birthday, his 91st. It was a story called “The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury.” And when Bradbury’s editor read it to the bed-ridden author, he reportedly took great pleasure in it.
What could have been better? I guess only hearing Neil Gaiman read the story himself. Which is precisely what you can do with the audio below.
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“The Dead” is the last – and most memorable – short story in James Joyce’s first book, Dubliners. Set during a New Year’s feast in 1904, the story focuses on Gabriel Conroy, a plump, bespectacled young man who is painfully aware of his own social ineptitude. As he navigates one minor faux pas after the next – making a poorly received joke here, clumsily parrying a barbed joke there – he comes to realize over the course of the party that his beautiful, distant wife has a past he never knew.
James’s story is filled with such humor, attention to character and musicality of language that it seems to cry out to be read aloud. The NPR series Selected Shorts heeded that call and presents the entire story performed live by Cynthia Nixon, of Sex and the City fame, who reads the first half, and by Irish author Colum McCann, who reads part of the second.
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.
Santa left a new Kindle, iPad, Kindle Fire or other media player under your tree. He did his job. Now we’ll do ours. We’ll tell you how to fill those devices with free intelligent media — great books, movies, courses, and all of the rest. And if you didn’t get a new gadget, fear not. You can access all of these materials on the good old fashioned computer. Here we go:
Free eBooks: You have always wanted to read the great works. And now is your chance. When you dive into our Free eBooks collection you will find 700 great works by some classic writers (Dickens, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare and Tolstoy) and contemporary writers (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, and Kurt Vonnegut). The collection also gives you access to the 51-volume Harvard Classics.
If you’re an iPad/iPhone user, the download process is super easy. Just click the “iPad/iPhone” links and you’re good to go. Kindle and Nook users will generally want to click the “Kindle + Other Formats links” to download ebook files, but we’d suggest watching these instructional videos (Kindle – Nook) beforehand.
Free Audio Books: What better way to spend your free time than listening to some of the greatest books ever written? This page contains a vast number of free audio books — 630 works in total — including texts by Arthur Conan Doyle, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, George Orwell and more recent writers — Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Carver, etc. You can download these classic books straight to your gadgets, then listen as you go.
[Note: If you’re looking for a contemporary book, you can download one free audio book from Audible.com. Find details on Audible’s no-strings-attached deal here.]
Free Online Courses: This list brings together over 1100 free online courses from leading universities, including Stanford, Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, Oxford and beyond.
These full-fledged courses range across all disciplines — history, physics, philosophy, psychology, business, and beyond. Most all of these courses are available in audio, and roughly 75% are available in video. You can’t receive credits or certificates for these courses (click here for courses that do offer certificates). But the amount of personal enrichment you will derive is immeasurable.
Free Movies: With a click of a mouse, or a tap of your touch screen, you will have access to 700 great movies. The collection hosts many classics, westerns, indies, documentaries, silent films and film noir favorites. It features work by some of our great directors (Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard and David Lynch) and performances by cinema legends: John Wayne, Jack Nicholson, Audrey Hepburn, Charlie Chaplin, and beyond. On this one page, you will find thousands of hours of cinema bliss.
Free Language Lessons: Perhaps learning a new language is high on your list of New Year’s resolutions. Well, here is a great way to do it. Take your pick of 46 languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, Mandarin, English, Russian, Dutch, even Finnish, Yiddish and Esperanto. These lessons are all free and ready to download.
Free Textbooks: And one last item for the lifelong learners among you. We have scoured the web and pulled together a list of 200 Free Textbooks. It’s a great resource particularly if you’re looking to learn math, computer science or physics on your own. There might be a diamond in the rough here for you.
Thank Santa, maybe thank us, and enjoy that new device.…
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
In a galloping vignette in Tablet, writer Lee Smith manages to evoke the essences of both sentimental tough guy Lou Reed and his literary mentor and hero, “Brooklyn Jewish Troubadour” Delmore Schwartz. Although Schwartz’s “poetry is his real legacy,” Smith writes, that rich body of work is often obscured by the fact that “his most famous work is a short story,” the much-anthologized “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” (1935) It’s a story written in prose as lyrical as can be—with sentences one wants to pause and linger over, reading again and again, out loud if possible. It’s also a story in which we see “a direct line… between Schwartz and Reed,” whose song “Perfect Day” performs similar kind of magical cataloguing of urban impermanence. For Reed, onetime student of Schwartz at Syracuse University, “Delmore Schwartz is everything.”
Reed dedicated the last song, “European Son,” on the first Velvet Underground album to Schwartz, and wrote an eloquent forward to a reissue of Schwartz’s first collection of stories and poems, also titled In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. And just above, you can hear Reed himself read the story aloud, savoring those lyrical sentences in his Brooklyn deadpan. It’s easy to imagine Reed writing many of these sentences, such was Schwartz’s influence on him. They shared not only common origins, but also a common sensibility; in Reed’s songs we hear the echo of Schwartz’s voice, the satirical world-weariness and the lyricism and longing. In the biographical documentary Rock and Roll Heart, Reed says that Schwartz showed him how, “with the simplest language imaginable, and very short, you can accomplish the most astonishing heights.” Reading, and listening to Schwartz’s astonishing “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” may help you understand just what he meant.
A quick heads up for Thomas Pynchon fans. Four decades after its publication, you can finally get Gravity’s Rainbow as an audio book — possibly even as a free audio book.
According to The New York Times, “Since the mid-1980s, a George Guidall recording [of the 1973 novel] has been floating around, like some mythical lost rocket part — no one had heard it, but all Pynchon fans knew someone who knew someone who had — but in October a new version, authorized and rerecorded… — hit the stands.”
The new release, which runs 40 hours and 1 minute, is also narrated by Guidall. It’s available on Audible.com. (Hear an audio sample below.) And there’s a way to get it for free. As we’ve mentioned before, Audible lets you download an audio book for free if you sign up for their 30-Day Free Trial. And even if you decide to cancel the trial, you can still keep the audio book and pay no money. That said, I dig Audible’s subscription service, as I’ve spelled out before, precisely because you can get big long audio books for a really reasonable price.
Learn more about the Free Trial program here, and to get Gravity’s Rainbow, simply click here and then click the “Try Audible Free” link on the right side of the page. NB: Audible is an Amazon.com subsidiary, and we’re a member of their affiliate program.
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Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
