Orhan Pamuk Reads Vladimir Nabokov

in Audio Books, Literature | December 14th, 2009

nabokov quiz

Image by Giuseppe Pino, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

If you don’t already know about it, The New York­er Fic­tion Pod­cast (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) fea­tures authors read­ing the works of oth­er major authors. One of the lat­est and great­est exam­ples: Orhan Pamuk, the 2006 win­ner of the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture, read­ing from Vladimir Nabokov’s “My Russ­ian Edu­ca­tion” (MP3 — iTunes — RSS Feed).

With­in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books, we have sev­er­al oth­er good reads from this series, includ­ing Paul Ther­oux read­ing Borges, Jef­frey Eugenides read­ing Harold Brod­key, Richard Ford read­ing John Cheev­er, and T. Cor­aghes­san Boyle read­ing Tobias Wolff.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

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Free Download of A Confederacy of Dunces

in Audio Books, Literature | December 11th, 2009

A quick note: Audi­ble is cur­rent­ly run­ning a nice deal. Click here to get a free down­load of the 1981 Pulitzer Prize win­ning nov­el, A Con­fed­er­a­cy of Dunces. (Move quick­ly, it’s prob­a­bly avail­able for just a short time.) You can also down­load pret­ty much any audio­book you want from Audi­ble, with no strings attached. I’ve includ­ed more info on that stand­ing offer here.

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Uranium Wars: A Free Audio Chapter

in Audio Books, Science | September 17th, 2009

Just a quick fyi: Audible.com is giv­ing away a free chap­ter (in audio) from a new book, Ura­ni­um Wars: The Sci­en­tif­ic Rival­ry that Cre­at­ed the Nuclear Age (pre­view it on Ama­zon here). Writ­ten by Amir Aczel, a skilled pop­u­lar sci­ence writer, the book takes a close look at the sci­en­tists who dis­cov­ered the destruc­tive poten­tial of ura­ni­um and launched the begin­ning of the nuclear age. Since the book has been get­ting good reviews, I thought that I’d flag this free give­away. Also, as men­tioned here before, Audi­ble runs a reg­u­lar pro­mo­tion that will let you down­load a free audio­book of your choice (for exam­ple, Ura­ni­um Wars) if you start a 14 day free tri­al. Once the tri­al is over, you can con­tin­ue your Audi­ble sub­scrip­tion, or can­cel it, and still keep the free book. The choice is yours. You can ini­ti­ate that process here.

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Good “Reads” On Audible (with Freebie Possibilities)

in Audio Books, Books, Deals, Literature | August 21st, 2009

paul_austerA quick note: Audi­ble has recent­ly launched a series called the Audi­ble Mod­ern Van­guard (more details here) that brings ground­break­ing works and authors into unabridged audio for the first time. Here, you’ll find works by Paul Auster (one of my faves), Saul Bel­low, John Cheev­er, John Irv­ing, Kurt Von­negut, and William Kennedy.

There are some good “reads” here, and, unless I’m mis­tak­en, there’s a way that you can down­load one for free. I’ve cre­at­ed a page where you can get infor­ma­tion on Audi­ble’s (no strings attached) 14 day tri­al here, which gives you a com­plete­ly free down­load of any audio book you choose.

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The Future of Content Delivery

in Amazon Kindle, Audio Books, Books, Podcasts | August 18th, 2009

sigler2This pod­cast (get it here) presents the thoughts of Scott Sigler–media maven, NY Times Best­selling Author of INFECTED and CONTAGIOUS (both avail­able free as pod­casts), podi­o­book dynamo, and social net­work­ing mastermind–on none oth­er than “how will peo­ple read books in the near future?”

In this repod­cast of his keynote speech at this year’s Balti­con con­fer­ence, Scott talks about how he built a HUGE online fan base for his fic­tion, land­ed a major pub­lish­ing deal with Crown Books, reached NY Times best­seller sta­tus, and why he insists that giv­ing his fic­tion away for free is the best mar­ket­ing around.

He presents his thoughts on Big Pub­lish­ing, small pub­lish­ing, smart-phones vs. the Kin­dle, and per­haps most impor­tant­ly, lays out the meth­ods by which he pre-sold 1,500 copies of his new, self-pub­lished nov­el THE ROOKIE this April via his own web­site, scottsigler.com. That’s right: For­get print-on-demand and its high­er cost-per-book. Scott breaks down how he pre-sold enough books to pay for an entire print run before THE ROOKIE ever went to press! It’s a mod­el so far ahead of every­one else that we’ve got to take notes!

If you’re a writer or aspir­ing author, you need to lis­ten to this. And don’t let the intro scare you off.

To down­load this file and lis­ten to it on your own time, on your iPod or sim­i­lar device, sim­ple right click this link: DOWNLOAD and choose “Save Link as…” on a Mac, or “Save File” on a PC.

Or lis­ten to it right here:

Seth Har­wood, the author of JACK WAKES UP, will be teach­ing an online course (The Grip­ping Read) with Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies. And he’ll also be teach­ing an Author Boot­camp with Scott Sigler on Stan­ford’s cam­pus on Novem­ber 7 and 14. Each course only has a few slots still open.

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Junot Díaz Reads From “Drown”

in Audio Books, Books, Literature | August 5th, 2009

Junot_Díaz

Image by Christo­pher Peter­son, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

I first heard about Junot Díaz in the ear­ly 90s. He was only in his 20s, already pub­lish­ing in The New York­er, and get­ting a lot of wun­derkind talk. By 1996, he pub­lished, Drown, a best­selling col­lec­tion of short sto­ries that earned high praise. And then, things slowed down. It took a good eleven years for him to pub­lish The Brief Won­drous Life of Oscar Wao. But the patience paid off. The nov­el won him a Pulitzer in fact. And it’s an excel­lent read. Real­ly.

Hav­ing said this, I want to high­light Díaz read­ing one of his ear­ly New York­er sto­ries that also found its way into Drown. It’s called How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Hal­fie). The free audio clip, which is list­ed in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books (and pro­duced by The New York­er), has some col­or­ful lan­guage, but it’s not gra­tu­itous.

Look­ing for free, pro­fes­sion­al­ly-read audio books from Audible.com? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free tri­al with Audible.com, you can down­load two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here.

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Chris Anderson @ Google

in Audio Books, Books, Google | August 4th, 2009

Chris Ander­son, the author of Free: The Future of a Rad­i­cal Price (down­load a free audio file of the book here) is mak­ing the rounds, pro­mot­ing his new book. Of course, it was only nat­ur­al that Ander­son (also the author of The Long Tail and edi­tor-in-chief of Wired) should pay a vis­it to Google, a com­pa­ny that gen­er­ates bil­lions of dol­lars by serv­ing free con­tent and ser­vices. With the talk above, you get an intro­duc­tion to Ander­son­’s take on “free” and some good Q&A. The pre­sen­ta­tion runs about 53 min­utes in total.

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Never Mind Amazon, Get Your Free Orwell Here

in Audio Books, Books | July 22nd, 2009

The whole mini-con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing Ama­zon’s dele­tion of George Orwell’s 1984 and Ani­mal Farm from Kin­dle accounts remind­ed me of some­thing. Over at the Inter­net Archive, you can find 1984 avail­able as a free audio book. And, nice­ly, the record­ing is pro­fes­sion­al­ly done. You can down­load the full zip file here. Or alter­na­tive­ly you can get the indi­vid­ual mp3 files, or stream them, from this page. On a more per­ma­nent basis, you can find Orwell’s 1949 work housed in our Free Audio Book Col­lec­tion along with lots of oth­er free texts.

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.