Today is the birthday of the writer Joseph Conrad. He was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzniowski on December 3, 1857 in Berdichev, in the Polish Ukraine. As a young man he traveled the world as a merchant sailer, an experience that furnished material and inspiration for his English-language books, which include such classics as Nostromo, Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness.
To mark the occasion we bring you a recording of Orson Welles reading (listen to it here) Conrad’s short story “The Secret Sharer” in 1985 as one of his selections for The Orson Welles Library. “I think I’m made for Conrad,” Welles once said. “I think every Conrad story is a movie.” Conrad wrote “The Secret Sharer” in 1909. The story is told by the captain of a ship. One night, while on watch in waters near the Gulf of Siam, the captain discovers a naked swimmer clinging desperately to the side of the ship. He helps the mysterious man aboard and learns his story. The captain is then faced with a dilemma: Should he help the man, or turn him over to the people who are looking for him?
We’ve previously featured the free, downloadable stories and novels by author Neil Gaiman available online in video, audio, and text format. This is a wonderful thing, to be sure; Gaiman’s a fantastic writer of dark fantasy for children and adults alike, so who better to inaugurate this year’s Halloween celebrations with a new free story, available for download through Audible.com and read by Neil himself?
Gaiman’s new story, entitled “Click-Clack the Rattlebag,” is creepy, for sure, but that’s all I’m going say about it. You’ll need to download it yourself to find out more, and you really should because for every download of the story, Audible has agreed to donate a dollar to one of two charities that Neil has chosen—one for the U.S. and one for the U.K.. Gaiman has more information on his personal website, where he describes his negotiations with Audible in setting up the donations and the process of recording the story. He writes:
The story is unpublished (it will be published in a forthcoming anthology called Impossible Monsters, edited by Kasey Lansdale and coming out from Subterranean Press). It’s funny, a little bit, and it’s scary, just enough for Hallowe’en, I hope.
Gaiman also has a few requests: first, you need to download the story by Halloween in order to make the donation; second, please don’t give the story away—encourage people to go download it for themselves; and lastly, “wait to listen to it until after dark.” Atmosphere matters.
You do not need an Audible account to download the story, but you do need to give them your email address to prove you’re a human. U.S. readers should go to www.audible.com/ScareUs and U.K. readers to www.audible.co.uk/ScareUs. (Gaiman provides no instructions for readers in other countries; I suppose they could go to either site). So don’t wait—help Audible raise money for some worthy educational charities and get in the spirit with some great new fiction from one of the most imaginative writers working today. Finally, if you’re looking for more scary reads this Halloween, download Gaiman’s “All Hallow’s Read” book recommendations in a .pdf.
Note: Do you want to listen to other free audio books by Neil Gaiman? Just head over to Audible.com and register for a 30-day free trial. You can download any audiobook for free. Then, when the trial is over, you can continue your Audible subscription, or cancel it, and still keep the audio book. The choice is entirely yours. And, in full disclosure, let me tell you that we have a nice arrangement with Audible. Whenever someone signs up for a free trial, it helps support Open Culture.
Finally, we also suggest that you explore our collection of 450 Free Audio Books. It’s loaded with great classics.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
Novelist, screenwriter, poet, and translator Paul Auster has carved out a place for himself over the past several decades as a decidedly writer’s writer, a Brooklyn Borges of a sort, whose metafictional tales are often intricately constructed stories within stories (within stories). Auster is also known for writing and co-directing (with Wayne Wang) 1995 sleeper indie hit Smoke, a film about the denizens of a Brooklyn cigar shop. As with much of Auster’s fiction, a central character in Smoke is a broken-hearted, solitary writer (played by William Hurt). Auster’s 2002 novel The Book of Illusions is centered around a similar character, a writer deep in mourning. On April 11, 2001, Auster stopped by the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania to give a reading from The Book of Illusions. Below, you can hear him read the first two pages of the novel:
The complete UPenn event, including introduction and a lengthy reading from the second chapter is available here.
Penn Sound, which hosts the above reading, also has audio of Auster reading the entirely of an early collection of stories, The Red Notebook: True Stories, at the University of Buffalo in April of 1995. Auster has argued that fiction is “magnificently useless,” but valuable nonetheless for the joy it brings both writers and readers. In The Red Notebook he narrates what he claims are true events from his life. The collection is divided into four short sections: “The Red Notebook,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” “Accident Report,” and, the final narrative, “Why Write?” His answers to this final question–whether they’re really “true” or just magnificently useless inventions–show us surprising coincidences and odd patterns in the seemingly random business of daily life. Listen to the first installment below. You can find the complete audio, with introduction by Robert Creeley, here.
Penn Sound is a “center for programs in contemporary writing” at the University of Pennsylvania and features a large archive of recorded audio and video readings and discussions on contemporary poetry, fiction, and more.
The reading of The Red Notebook appears in our collection of Free Audio Books.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
When F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940, his New York Times obituary claimed, “the promise of his brilliant career was never fulfilled.” This is a sentence that may puzzle modern-day lovers of Fitzgerald’s enduringly-relevant fiction, but it was the judgment of the time on the exhausted, alcoholic writer’s career. And it was a judgment he often applied to himself, as he demonstrated publicly in his 1936 essay “The Crack-Up,” about his depression. Reduced at the end of his life to writing film scripts for money, a task he found degrading for a “successful literary man” such as himself, Fitzgerald also, at some time near his final year, made recordings of himself reading the work of Shakespeare, Keats, and others, presumably also for money, though it’s not exactly clear who produced the recordings or why.
In the first video (above), listen to Fitzgerald deliver a dignified reading of Othello’s speech to the Venetian Senators from Act 1, Scene 3 of Othello. Fitzgerald stumbles and slurs occasionally, and the speech may in fact be composed of several different takes edited together, suggesting that he may have had difficulty making it through. Nonetheless, his voice is seductive and sonorous; he reads the speech as a literary monologue, rather than a declaration. Hear more of him below, reading an edited version of John Masefield’s “On Growing Old,” a poem which may have had particular poignancy to the man who wrote in 1936, “of course all life is in a process of breaking down.” But even in decline, Fitzgerald was worth listening to. You can find major works by F. Scott Fitzgerald in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
“Moby-Dick is the great American novel. But it is also the great unread American novel. Sprawling, magnificent, deliriously digressive, it stands over and above all other works of fiction, since it is barely a work of fiction itself. Rather, it is an explosive exposition of one man’s investigation into the world of the whale, and the way humans have related to it. Yet it is so much more than that.”
That’s how Plymouth University introduces Herman Melville’s classic tale from 1851. And it’s what sets the stage for their web project launched earlier this week. It’s called The Moby Dick Big Read, and it features celebrities and lesser known figures reading all 135 chapters from Moby Dick — chapters that you can start downloading (as free audio files) on a rolling, daily basis. Find them on iTunes, Soundcloud, RSS Feed, or the Big Read web site itself.
The project started with the first chapters being read by Tilda Swinton (Chapter 1), Captain R.N. Hone (Chapter 2), Nigel Williams (Chapter 3), Caleb Crain (Chapter 4), Musa Okwonga (Chapter 5), and Mary Norris (Chapter 6). John Waters, Stephen Fry, Simon Callow and even Prime Minister David Cameron will read future chapters, which often find themselves accompanied by contemporary artwork inspired by the novel.
If you want to read the novel as you go along, find the text in our collection of Free eBooks. We also have versions read by one narrator in our Free Audio Books collection. Tilda Swinton’s narration of Chapter 1 appears right below:
Did you know T.S. Eliot’s portentous and heavily allusive 1922 masterpiece “The Waste Land” was originally titled “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” a quote from Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend? Filled with references to Dante’s Divine Comedy, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and James Frazier’s The Golden Bough, this most famous of high modernist poems—scourge of millions of college freshman each year—was a very different animal before notorious modernist impresario Ezra Pound got his hands on it. Pound’s heavy reworking is responsible for the poem you hear above, read by Eliot himself. The first image in the video shows Pound’s marginal annotations.
In the video above listen to Eliot read his second-most famous work, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with the text of the poem choreographed by Wordookie, an open-source version of Wordle. “Prufrock,” first published in 1915, is as dense with literary allusions as “The Waste Land” (and thus as painful for the average undergraduate). And if Eliot’s reedy alto doesn’t deliver “Prufrock“ ‘s gravitas for you, listen to Anthony Hopkins read it here.
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Before Banned Books Week comes to a close, we bring you Allen Ginsberg’s 1955 poem, Howl. The controversial poem became his best known work, and it now occupies a central place in the Beat literary canon, standing right alongside Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. Ginsberg first read the poem aloud on October 7, 1955, to a crowd of about 150 at San Francisco’s Six Gallery. (James Franco reenacted that moment in the 2010 film simply called Howl.)
Things got dicey when City Lights published the poem in 1956, and especially when they tried to import 520 printed copies from London in ’57. US customs officials seized the copies, and California prosecutors tried City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his partner, Shigeyosi Murao, on obscenity charges that same year. Nine literary experts testified to the redeeming social value of Howl, and, after a lengthy trial, the judge ruled that the poem was of “redeeming social importance.”
Above, we give you Ginsberg reading Howl in 1959. It’s also listed in the Poetry section of our Free Audio Books collection. An online version of the text appears here.
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!
A number of sites offer free Mp3s of public domain books—Librivox and Podiobooks, for instance. What sets apart Lit2Go, the University of South Florida’s extensive collection of free audio books (Web — iTunes), are the materials to help K‑12 teachers present literature in the classroom.
From fairy tales to The Iliad (Web — iTunes), Lit2Go organizes more than 200 titles by author and genre (adventure, gothic, history, science fiction) with clear genre descriptions and plot summaries for young readers. The look and feel of the site’s beta version is user-friendly and library-like, with typewriter fonts and illustrations making it a pleasure to browse. There are a few small kinks to be worked out however, so teachers interested in downloading supplemental materials should opt for the original site.
Lit2Go marries the old school library form (each novel’s year of publication and original publisher is included) with the capacity of the web (a link takes readers directly to the iTunes store, where Lit2Go has its own section of free downloads).
Many titles include support material to kick off classroom discussion or to coach students through developing their own character diagrams. One of the site’s real assets is the way it curates titles into collections, including African-American Literature, American Founders and the intriguing Happiness Collection where readers find Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem “The Swing” and Shakespeare’s heart-stopping scene in which Friar Laurence marries Romeo to Juliet (Web — iTunes).
Another curatorial bonus: Materials are also organized by grade level, using the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level index. Teachers and students can also download each title’s full text as a PDF, to read along to the audio.
Meanwhile, your can find hundreds of downloadable works of literature in our own meta collection of Free Audio Books.
Kate Rix writes about k‑12 instruction and higher ed.
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