Back in 2011, Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortés published the mock children’s book, Go the F**k to Sleep. And it gained national attention when pirated PDF copies circulated on the internet, and a reading by Werner Herzog made the rounds on YouTube, both of which turned the book into a #1 bestseller on Amazon. Now, three years later, Mansbach is back with a sequel, You Have to F–king Eat. The print edition went on sale today, and, even better, the audio edition, narrated by Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston, can be downloaded for free over at Audible.com. The irreverent, 4‑minute NSFW reading will remain free through 12/12/14. You can hear a sample above.
Perhaps you’ve held off on listening to Re:Joyce, Frank Delaney’s line-by-line, episode-by-episode podcast exegesis of James Joyce’s Ulysses, because you want to listen not just to a breakdown of the novel, but to the novel itself. If so, then boy, have we got another ongoing project for you to follow: The Complete Ulysses, which has a mandate to record every word of Ulysses as “the first American production” of the book “using mostly American and Irish-American actors like Alec Baldwin, John Lithgow, Jerry Stiller, Garrison Keillor, Anne Meara, Wallace Shawn, Bob Dishy, Anne Enright, Bob Odenkirk, Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, and Caraid O’Brien as Molly Bloom.” The producers have planned to make available recordings of each chapter as soon as they finish them, “on almost all current and future audio media.” You can browse the so-far completed material here.
“The project began more than 30 years ago,” says The Complete Ulysses’ site, “when [radio station] WBAI broadcast a marathon reading of Ulysses from the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore at 81st and Broadway in New York.” Bookstore owner Larry Josephson “took the idea of a long-form radio reading of Ulysses to Isaiah Sheffer, then Artistic Director of Symphony Space.” This resulted in Bloomsday on Broadway, an 18-hour “live, staged reading of excerpts from Ulysses and other Irish literature and song.” Having then created Radio Bloomsday, a WBAI reading series “featuring live and pre-recorded readings from Ulysses and lots of other things Irish,” Josephson “got the ‘insane’ idea of recording the entire book, which will run about 30 hours.”
Ambitious, yes, but then the same applies to Re:Joyce, and indeed to Ulysses itself, which you can find in our collection of Free eBooks. Joyce has long had a way of inspiring creators to execute their own “insane” ideas, and this one in particular gives his own work a whole new means of expression. Tuning into Radio Bloomsday has, for a few years now, appeared as a mainstay on various press outlets’ “what to do on Bloomsday” lists, but with The Complete Ulysses, you certainly don’t need to wait until June 16 for a Joycean experience; these days, a properly equipped iPod can turn every day into Bloomsday.
If you can’t wait for The Complete Ulysses to be completed, you can always download a reading of Ulysses in its entirety here (in audio format).
Note: The drawing above is none other than Leopold Bloom, drawn by Joyce himself in 1926, when his eyesight was failing. We have more on that story here.
In Stephen King’s first televised interview from way back in 1982, the horror writer revealed that he sleeps with the lights on. He may have grown out of the habit by now, but it’s no wonder if he hasn’t. A macabre imagination like his probably sees all sorts of creepy things lurking in the dark. In any case, King has certainly learned a thing or two since then about making his fears more marketable. In the past several years he’s been promoting his work on the Internet to reach new audiences.
In 2000, his novella Riding the Bulletdebuted exclusively online, and in 2008 he partnered with Marvel Comics to promote his first collection of short stories in six years, releasing one short graphic video episode at a time adapted from the 56-page novella “N.” See all 25 episodes above. It’s a story, writes Time, “about a psychologist whose obsessive-compulsive patient is entranced by a mysterious plot of land.” King calls the adaptation “kind of a video comic book,” and while the “point of the exercise,” says his editor Susan Moldow,” is to stimulate book sales,” I think you’ll agree it’s a pretty nifty bit of storytelling on its own.
On King’s website, you’ll find links to all sorts of multimedia products, including a Lifetime original movie, Big Driver, a film titled A Good Marriage, now out on video-on-demand, and the latest from graphic novel series Dark Tower. You’ll also find a comic adaptation of the short story “Little Green God of Agony.” See the first panel above, and read the full story here.
Long before Youtube and online comics, there was the audiobook. King has narrated his own work for years, and it’s also been read by such big names as Kathy Bates, Sissy Spacek, Willem Defoe, Anne Heche, Eli Wallach, and many more. Just above, hear character actor John Glover—a name you may not know, but a face you’d recognize—read “One for the Road,” a story from King’s first, 1978, collection Night Shift. It’s a vampire story, but a particularly deft one, writes Noah Charney at New Haven Review, one that “deals in archetypes that are the heart of good horror fiction.” King’s stories, Charney asserts, are “beautifully-written, highly intelligent. They happen to feature monsters of all sorts, from natural to preternatural, but that is secondary to their core as great stories, well-told.”
King has long defended popular fiction to the literati—in his acceptance speech for the National Book Award, for example—and lashed out at “the keepers of the idea of serious literature,” whom he says “have a short list of authors who are going to be allowed inside.” It may have taken a few years, but King got in, eventually publishing in such august outlets as The Atlantic and The New Yorker. Read four stories from those publications at the links below. And if you’re still in need of a good scare in the days leading up to Halloween, make sure to check out “The Man in the Black Suit,” a short film adaptation of another story published in The New Yorker in 1994.
With 1984’s Neuromancer, William Gibson may not have invented cyberpunk, but he certainly crystallized it. The novel exemplifies the tradition’s mandate to bring together “high tech and low life,” or, in the words of Gibson himself, to explore what “any given science-fiction favorite would look like if we could crank up the resolution.”
It may have its direct predecessors, but Gibson’s tale of hackers, street samurai, conspiracists, and shadowy artificial intelligences against virtual reality, dystopian urban Japan, and a variety of other international and technological backdrops remains not just archetypal but, unusually for older technology-oriented fiction, exciting.
Now you can not only read Gibson’s cyberpunk-defining words, but hear them in Gibson’s voice: a 1994 abridged edition, released only on cassette tapes and now long out of print, resides in MP3 form online here .
You can get a taste of this particular Neuromancer audiobook and its production in the clip above. I always appreciate hearing authors read their own work, but people will surely disagree about whether the laid-back tones of a man who often describes himself as thoroughly un-cutting-edge ideally suit the material. If you think it doesn’t, or if you don’t like the abridged-ness of this edition, you suffer no lack of alternatives: Arthur Addison read an unabridged one for Books on Tape in 1997, in 2011 Robertson Dean read another one for Penguin Audiobooks, and in 2012 Jeff Harding did yet another. (Note: You can download the Dean edition for free via Audible if you enroll in their 30 Day Free Trial. We have more details on that here.) Those who have found themselves hooked on the internet, in any of its modern forms, will certainly hear a lot of prescience in Gibson’s conception of technology as addictive drug. But in my experience, cyberpunk stories, too, can prove fiercely habit forming. Rather than the first cyberpunk novel, or the most important one, or the genre’s blueprint, let’s just call Neuromancer the gateway.
Published back in 2011, Go the F–k to Sleep, the playful children’s storybook meant for adults, became a big besteller. It topped Amazon’s bestseller list for a while. And, before you knew it, celebrities were giving public readings of the book. Perhaps you’ll recall Werner Herzog’s fun reading at The New York Public Library.
Samuel L. Jackson did the honors when the book was released in its official audio format. Now that reading is free to download thanks to Audible.com. Unabridged, it runs a mere 6 minutes. To download the audio, you will need to register with Audible. We hope you’ll get a good laugh out of it.
[PS: If you’re interested in other ways to download a free audio book from Audible, be sure to see their a 30-day free trial program. We have more info on that here.]
The Stories of John Cheever, a collection of 61 stories chronicling the lives of “the greatest generation,” was first published in 1978 with much fanfare. The critics liked it. The weighty, 700-page book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1979. The people liked it too. The Stories of John Cheever, Michiko Kakutani wrote in Cheever’s 1982 obit, was “one of the few collections of short fiction ever to make The New York Times best-seller list.”
The collection features some of Cheever’s best-known stories: “The Enormous Radio,” “Goodbye, My Brother,” “The Five-Forty-Eight,” and “The Country Husband.” And also perhaps his most famous short piece of fiction, “The Swimmer.”
First published in The New Yorker in July, 1964, “The Swimmer” was originally conceived as a novel and ran over some 150 pages, before the author pared it down to a taut eleven pages. Those eleven pages apparently take some 25 minutes to read. Above, you can hear Cheever reading “The Swimmer,” in its entirety, at New York’s 92nd St. Y. The audio was recorded on December 19, 1977, and it’s otherwise housed in our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.
In 2009, Neil Gaimanwon the Newbery Medal for The Graveyard Book, a prestigious prize given to “the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.” The American Library Association, the organization that bestows the award, called The Graveyard Book a “delicious mix of murder, fantasy, humor and human longing,” and cited its “magical, haunting prose.” You can savor that prose by watching the playlist of videos embedded above. During the book tour for The Graveyard Book, Gaiman read a different chapter at every stop, and his publisher, HarperCollins, recorded the readings and made them available online. If you have roughly eight hours of free time, you can watch the reading from start to finish.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
Some year later, in 1991, the BBC dramatized eight stories from Bradbury’s collection. Adapted by Lawrence Gilbert, the stories were performed by a full cast and aired on the radio. The audio, running almost two hours, can be streamed below thanks to Archive.org. It’s otherwise housed in our collection of 550 Free Audio Books. Enjoy.
Below we have some other radio dramatizations of sci-fi/dystopian classics.
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