Hear H.P. Lovecraft Horror Stories Read by Roddy McDowall

in Literature | March 6th, 2020

“Most daemoniacal of all shocks is that of the abysmally unexpected and grotesquely unbelievable,” goes a typical line in the work of H.P. Lovecraft. “Nothing I had before undergone could compare in terror with what I now saw; with the bizarre marvels that sight implied.” As a writer of what he called “weird fiction,” Lovecraft specialized in the narrator plunged into a loss for words by the sheer incomprehensibility of that which he sees before him. But in the case of this particular sentence, the narrator sees not an ancient monster awakened from its millennia of slumber but “nothing less than the solid ground” — or as the reader put it, nothing more than the solid ground. But then, most of us haven’t lived our entire lives locked up high in a castle.

The story is “The Outsider,” something of an outlier in the Lovecraft canon due to its outsized popularity as well as its Gothic tinge. By the author’s own admission, it owes a debt to his literary idol Edgar Allan Poe, and indeed represents Lovecraft’s “literal though unconscious imitation of Poe at its very height.”

In 1926 or today, one could do much worse for a model than Poe, and critics have also detected in “The Outsider” the possible influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Shelley, and Oscar Wilde. Anyone daring to read the story aloud must thus strike a balance between several different competing tones, and few could hope to outdo Roddy McDowall’s performance on the 1966 record above. But as Dangerous Minds’ Paul Gallagher notes, that actor, “child star of Lassie Come Home and My Friend Flicka,” is “hardly a name one would associate with the master of the unnameable.”

Though McDowall would later “star in some jolly decent horror movies like The Legend of Hell House and Fright Night, he was in 1966 best known for the likes of “That Darn Cat! or Lord Love a Duck or the stage musical Camelot.” In the event, McDowell proved “almost a perfect choice to give life to Lovecraft’s words,” delivering a “light boyish charm” combined with an intonation that “causes a growing disquiet and a dreadful sense of unease,” altogether suitable for the work of “the weird and reclusive Lovecraft.” He also brings to the role the kind of faint, unexpectedly refined menace that would make him famous as Cornelius and Caesar in the Planet of the Apes films. After “The Outsider” McDowall reads Lovecaft’s earlier story “The Hound,” and surely his voice is just the one in which Lovecraft fans would want to hear spoken, for the very first time in Lovecraft’s oeuvre, the name of the Necronomicon.

Be sure to explore out collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.

via Dangerous Minds

23 Hours of H.P. Lovecraft Stories: Hear Readings & Dramatizations of “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” & Other Weird Tales

An Animated Introduction to H.P. Lovecraft and How He Invented a New Gothic Horror

H.P. Lovecraft’s Monster Drawings: Cthulhu & Other Creatures from the “Boundless and Hideous Unknown”

H.P. Lovecraft Gives Five Tips for Writing a Horror Story, or Any Piece of “Weird Fiction”

Making The Planet of the Apes: Roddy McDowall’s Home Movies and a 1966 Makeup Test

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Library of Congress Wants You to Help Transcribe Walt Whitman’s Poems & Letters: Almost 4000 Unpublished Documents Are Waiting

in Libraries, Literature, Poetry | March 2nd, 2020

Every once in a while, a prominent artist will offer the advice that you should quit your day job and never look back. In some fields, this may be possible, though it’s becoming increasingly difficult these days, which may explain the reception Brian Eno gets when he tells art school students “not to have a job.” Eno admits, “I rarely get asked back.” In a letter to his anxious mother, Gustave Flaubert, railed against “those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night.” Such a life, he wrote, was “made for mediocre minds.”

Sure, if you can swing it, by all means, quit your job. Most poets throughout history—save the few with independent means or wealthy patrons—haven’t had the luxury. Poetry may never pay the bills, but that shouldn’t stop a poet from writing. It didn’t stop T.S. Eliot, who worked as an editor (he rejected George Orwell’s Animal Farm) and a bank clerk (he turned down a fellowship from the Bloomsbury group). It did not stop William Carlos Williams, the doctor, nor Wallace Stevens, who spent his days in the insurance game, nor Charles Bukowski, though he’d never recommend it….

Then there’s ultimate journeyman poet Walt Whitman, who left school at 11 to get a job and variously throughout his life “worked as a school teacher, printer, newspaper editor, journalist, carpenter, freelance writer, civil servant, and Union Army nurse in Washington D.C. during the Civil War,” as the Library of Congress (LOC) noted for the 200th anniversary of the poet’s 1819 birth. The LOC holds “the world’s largest Walt Whitman manuscript collection” and last year they announced a volunteer campaign to transcribe thousands of unpublished documents.

Whitman offered his own possibly dubious advice to aspiring writers—“don’t write poetry”—but he himself never stopped writing, no matter the demands of the day. He also advised, “it is a good plan for every young man or woman having literary aspirations to carry a pencil and a piece of paper and constantly jot down striking events in daily life. They thus acquire a vast fund of information.” Whitman’s “jottings” include typed and handwritten letters, original copies of poems, drafts of essays and reviews, and more.

His prose is always lively and robust, full of exhortations, exaltations, and admixtures of the high literary language and casual talk of city streets that were his hallmark. Witness the wild swings in tone in his brief letter to Abraham P. Leech (above) circa 1881:

Friend Leech,

How d’ye do? — I have quite a hankering to hear from and see Jamaica, and the Jamaicaites. — A pressure of business only, has prevented my coming out among the “friends of yore” and the familiar places which your village contains. –I was an hour in your village the other day, but did not have time to come up and see you,–I think of coming up in the course of the winter holidays.–Farewell–and don’t forget write to me, through the P.O. May your kind angel hover in the invisible air, and lose sight of your blessed presence never.

Whitman

There are many, many more such documents remaining to be transcribed among the close to 4000 in the LoC’s digitized Whitman collection. “More than half of those have been completed so far,” writes Mental Floss, and roughly 1860 transcriptions still need to be reviewed. Anyone can read the documents that need approval and officially add them to the Whitman archive.” This is a very worthy project, and it may or may not feel like work to volunteer your time deciphering, reading, and transcribing Whitman’s ebullient hand.

The question may still remain: How did Whitman acquire the physical and mental stamina to get so much excellent writing done and still hold down steady gigs to make the rent? Perhaps a series of guides called “Manly Health and Training” that he wrote between 1858 and 1860 hold a clue. The poet recommends routine trips to the “gymnasium” and a diet of meat, “to the exclusion of all else.” For those “students, clerks” and others “in sedentary and mental employments”—including the “literary man”—he has one word: “Up!”

As with all such pieces of advice, results may vary. Enter the two huge manuscript archives—“Miscellaneous” and “Poetry”—at the Library of Congress digital collections and peruse, or transcribe, as much of Whitman’s endless stream of writing as you like.

via Mental Floss

Walt Whitman Gives Advice to Aspiring Young Writers: “Don’t Write Poetry” & Other Practical Tips (1888)

Walt Whitman’s Poem “A Noiseless Patient Spider” Brought to Life in Three Animations

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Free: Read the Original 23,000-Word Essay That Became Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)

in Books, Literature | February 28th, 2020

Because my story was true. I was certain of that. And it was extremely important, I felt, for the meaning of our journey to be made absolutely clear.

The publication history of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the story of gonzo journalism itself, a form dependent upon the unreliability of its narrator, who becomes a central character in the ostensibly real-life drama. In Thompson’s hallucinogenic tales of his travels to Las Vegas with attorney and Chicano activist Oscar Zeta Acosta, the reporter went so far as to become a fictional character.

The journey began with a commission from Rolling Stone to report on the death of reporter Ruben Salazar, killed by a Los Angeles police tear gas grenade at an anti-Vietnam War protest. This trip diverted, however, to Las Vegas, where Thompson drove to report on the Mint 400 desert race for Sports Illustrated. Rather than submitting the 250-word piece the magazine requested, he gave them a 2,500-word psychedelic fugue, the very beginnings of Fear and Loathing. The piece, Thompson later wrote, was “aggressively rejected.”

Instead, Jann Wenner liked what he saw enough to eventually publish it in the November 1971 issue of Rolling Stone as a 23,000-word essay bearing the title of the novel it would become, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.” You can read that by-now familiarly wild account, here. In it, Thompson gave the magazine’s readers a succinct definition of his reporting style:

But what was the story? Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism.

The term defines the form as the mirror obverse of the American Dream, Thompson’s excesses no more than illicit versions of the culture he picked apart, one that produced an event like the Mint 400, “the richest off-the-road race for motorcycles and dune-buggies in the history of organized sport,” he wrote, and “a fantastic spectacle….”

What were Thompson and Acosta (or Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo) doing if not holding the main event of disorganized sport in their race across the desert against their own paranoid delusions? The truths Thompson told need never have been factual—they were the outrageous truths we find in any good story, well told: about the bats—as in the famous Goya etching—swarming around the passed-out head of Reason.

Read Thompson’s original, now iconic essay here.

Read 11 Free Articles by Hunter S. Thompson That Span His Gonzo Journalist Career (1965–2005)

How Hunter S. Thompson Gave Birth to Gonzo Journalism: Short Film Revisits Thompson’s Seminal 1970 Piece on the Kentucky Derby

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Why We Should Read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies: An Animated Video Makes the Case

in Literature | February 24th, 2020

Like many of you, I was assigned to read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies in junior high. (Raise your hand if you had the one with this cover). Looking back, was there a subconscious reason our teacher gave us this famous tale of a group of shipwrecked children and young teens turning into murderous savages? Were we really that bad?

Perhaps you’ve never read the book and got assigned To Kill a Mockingbird or Kes instead. Is Golding’s book still worth picking up as an adult?

For sure, yes, and this animated explainer from Jill Dash of TED-Ed hopefully will entice you do so. What it provides is what we didn’t get in school: context.

Golding had been a lieutenant in the Royal Navy during the war, and had returned to find a post-war world where nuclear annihilation felt palpable. He was also teaching at a private school for boys. He got to wondering: are we doomed as a species to savagery? Is war inevitable?

Golding was also thinking about the popular Young Adult novels (as we now call them) of his day, because he read them to his own children. A popular trope featured young boys as castaways on a desert island who get up to all sorts of fun adventures, with a dash of British colonialism thrown in for good measure. All were riffs on Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

Lord of the Flies, then, is a brutal satire, reducing angelic British schoolboys to a bloodthirsty mob in very little time, while in the greater world of the novel nuclear war rages. (Having read this during the ‘80s, the nuclear background was never impressed on us students. I think I would have found the novel even more terrifying.)

It took Golding ten years to find an interested publisher, and even then it was a flop on initial release. But its reputation soon grew, helped by Peter Brook’s black-and-white film adaptation, and its pedagogical use as an allegorical tale during the Cold War. It also influenced a generation of writers. Stephen King named his fictional town Castle Rock after the kids’ fort in the novel. It also opened the door for any number of Young Adult authors to deal with dark and troubling themes.

There were also real-world examples to draw from. In the same year, 1954, as Golding’s novel appeared, Muzafer Sherif’s The Robbers Cave Experiment was published. This was non-fiction, however, detailing an experiment in which 22 middle-class white boys were set up in two groups at a deserted Oklahoma summer camp. With scientists posing as counselors, they let the groups–the Rattlers and the Eagles–sort out their own hierarchies, then set up competitions.

The psychologists watched the arms race escalate over the following days. Finally, one violent mob brawl became so sustained that the researchers were forced to step in, drag the boys apart and remove them to separate locations.

How long did it take for mere friction to escalate into a juvenile war, in an idyllic setting where everyone had plenty of food? Phase two lasted just six days from the first insult (“Fatty!”) to the final all-out brawl. Golding would have loved it.

We can see Golding’s warning everywhere in popular culture, from the back-biting and betrayals in reality shows like Survivor to horror movies like The Purge. We’ve also seen the terrors that children can inflict on each other, Columbine school shooting onward. In Golding’s novel, the children are rescued and revert back to a sobbing, dependent state. In the real world, alas, nobody’s coming to save us.

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Hunter Thompson Died 15 Years Ago: Hear Him Remembered by Tom Wolfe, Johnny Depp, Ralph Steadman, and Others

in Literature | February 21st, 2020

Hunter S. Thompson died on February 20, 2005, fifteen years ago, and ever since we’ve been wondering aloud what he would make of the state of the world today. Though events have all but cried out for another Thompson to savagely describe and even more savagely ridicule them, what other writer could live up to the formidable standard Thompson set with Hell’s Angels, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and his other harrowing gonzo-journalistic views of the American scene? These works, as the late Tom Wolfe puts it in the interview clip above, made Thompson “the great comic writer of the twentieth century.”

Like anyone who knew the man, Wolfe had Hunter Thompson stories. The one he tells here takes place in Aspen, Colorado, years after Thompson ran for sheriff there and nearly won. As soon as Thompson and Wolfe were seated at a local restaurant, Thompson ordered four banana daiquiris and four banana splits.

After consuming all that, he called the waitress back: “Do it again.” This may remind fans of a more gluttonous version of the scene in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo threateningly demand an entire pie at a diner. The real-life Thompson also had voracious appetites, not just for junk food and intoxicants but also for destruction, as evidenced by the story of propane-tank target practice Johnny Depp tells above.

Depp, who played Thompson in Terry Gilliam’s film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, also bonded with the writer in ways not involving eighty-foot fireballs. Both came from Kentucky, and both admired the writing of the 1930s satirist Nathanael West. The two would read West’s work aloud to one another, and later Thompson’s own. (We’ve previously featured Depp reading the “wave speech,” Thompson’s best-known passage, here on Open Culture.) “Hunter taught me how he wanted his work read,” Depp remembers, “and if there’s anything such as a blessing, that was it.” The private Thompson may have loved American prose, but the public Thompson loved outrageous behavior. As John Cusack puts it in the clip above, “He was ready for a show that was beyond any sense of decency and went into some absurdist land that made your heads bend.”

Few had as much exposure to Th0mpson’s head-bending as Ralph Steadman, the artist whose illustrations made visible the Thompsonian “gonzo” sensibility. “Gonzo is a Portuguese word, and it means hinge,” Steadman says in the news segment above. “I guess to be gonzo is to be hinged — or unhinged.” The two first met at the 1970 Kentucky Derby, where they were meant to collaborate on a piece about the race. In the event, they did more drinking and rumor-spreading than reporting, and it all led to a moment of truth: “We looked in the mirror and there we saw the evil face: it was us, looking back at us.” The final product, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” now looks like the birth of a form Thompson and Steadman created, perfected, and quite possibly destroyed.

In the Joe Rogan Experience clip above, journalist Matt Taibbi describes Thompson’s writing thus: “He let it all hang out and just said whatever the hell he thought, and he let the chips fall where they may.” Easy though that may sound, in his best work Thompson managed to employ “the same techniques that the great fiction writers use” to craft a “four-dimensional story, but at the same time it was also journalism.” As the current occupant of Thompson’s old political-reporter job at Rolling Stone, Taibbi knows better than anyone that “most people couldn’t get away with that.” It takes “a Mark Twain-level talent to do what he did, which is to mix the ambition of great fiction with journalism” — like most of Thompson’s endeavors, “one of those don’t-try-this-at-home things.”

Johnny Depp Reads Hunter S. Thompson’s Famous “Wave Speech” from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Hunter S. Thompson Interviews Keith Richards, and Very Little Makes Sense

How Hunter S. Thompson Gave Birth to Gonzo Journalism: Short Film Revisits Thompson’s Seminal 1970 Piece on the Kentucky Derby

Hunter S. Thompson, Existentialist Life Coach, Gives Tips for Finding Meaning in Life

Watch Hunter S. Thompson & Ralph Steadman Head to Hollywood in a Revealing 1978 Documentary

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

The New York Public Library Creates a List of 125 Books That They Love

in Books, Libraries, Literature, Podcasts | February 17th, 2020

The New York Public Library sure knows how to celebrate a quasquicentennial. In honor of its own 125th anniversary, it’s rolling out a number of treats for patrons, visitors, and those who must admire it from afar.

In addition to the expected author talks and live events, Patience and Fortitude, the iconic stone lions who flank the main branch’s front steps, are displaying some reading material of their own—Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age classic The Great Gatsby, from 1925.

Donors who kick in $12.50 or more to help the library continue providing such public services as early literacy classes, free legal aid, and job training courses will be rewarded with a cheerful red sticker bearing the easy to love slogan “♥ reading.”

The cover image of Ezra Jack Keats’ 1962 Caldecott Award-winning picture book The Snowy Day, which at 485,583 checkouts holds the title for most popular book in the circulating collection, graces special edition Library and MetroCards.

And a team of librarians drew up a list of 125 books from the last 125 years that inspire a lifelong love of reading.

The list is deliberately inclusive with regard to authors’ gender, race, and sexual orientation as well as literary genre. In addition to novels and non-fiction, you’ll find memoir, poetry, fantasy, graphic novels, science fiction, mystery, short stories, humor, and one children’s book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, which the judges decided “transcends age categories.” (A similar list geared toward younger readers will be released later this year.)

The list was drawn from a pool containing anything published after May 23rd, 1895, the day attorney John Bigelow’s plan to combine the resources of the Astor and Lenox libraries and the Tilden Trustin into The New York Public Library was officially incorporated.

The selection criteria can be viewed here.

Obviously, the list—and any perceived omissions—will generate passionate debate amongst book lovers, a prospect the library relishes, though it’s enlisted one of its most ardent supporters, author Neil Gaiman, whose American Gods made the final cut, to remind any disgruntled readers of the spirit in which the picks were made:

The New York Public Library has put together a list of 125 books that they love—the librarians and the people in the library. That’s the criteria. You may not love them, but they do. And that’s exciting. The thing that gets people reading is love. The thing that makes people pick up books they might not otherwise try, is love. It’s personal recommendations, the kind that are truly meant. So here are 125 books that they love. And somewhere on this list you will find books you’ve never read, but have always meant to, or have never even heard of. There are 125 chances here to change your own life, or to change someone else’s, curated by the people from one of the finest libraries in the world. Read with joy. Read with love. Read!

To really get the most out of the list, tune in to the NYPL’s The Librarian Is In podcast, which will be devoting an episode to one of the featured titles each month.

The current episode kicks things off with co-hosts Frank Collerius and Rhonda Evans’ favorites from the list:

Maus by Art Spiegelman

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Readers, have a look at the complete list of the New York Public Library’s 125 Books for Adult Readers, and leave us a comment to let us know what titles you wish had been included. Or better yet, tell us which as-yet unread title you’re planning to read in honor of the New York Public Library’s 125th year:

George Orwell, 1984

Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

W.H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety

Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

James Patterson, Along Came a Spider

Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Mary Oliver, American Primitive

Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

Sylvia Plath, Ariel

Ian McEwan, Atonement

Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

Toni Morrison, Beloved

Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn

Joseph Heller, Catch-22

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Claudia Rankine, Citizen

Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes

Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic

Alice Walker, The Color Purple

Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress

Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

Frank Herbert, Dune

Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Alyssa Cole, An Extraordinary Union

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

J.R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home

George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find

Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Allen Ginsberg, Howl

Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

Beverly Jenkins, Indigo

Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Gore Vidal, Julian

Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Mary Karr, The Liars’ Club

Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Art Spiegelman, Maus

David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

Martin Amis: Money

Michael Lewis: Moneyball

Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

J.D. Robb, Naked in Death

Richard Wright, Native Son

Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master’s Son

Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint

Graham Greene, The Quiet American

Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

Louise Erdrich, The Round House

Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

Alice Munro, Runaway

John Ashbery, Self-Portrarit in a Convex Mirror

Stephen King, The Shining

Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

Nalini Singh, Slave to Sensation

Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever

Albert Camus, The Stranger

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

George Saunders, Tenth of December

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Denis Johnson, Train Dreams

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen

Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Don DeLillo, White Noise

Zadie Smith, White Teeth

Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior

Via Lit Hub

The New York Public Library Lets You Download 180,000 Images in High Resolution: Historic Photographs, Maps, Letters & More

New York Public Library Card Now Gives You Free Access to 33 NYC Museums

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join Ayun’s company Theater of the Apes in New York City this March for her book-based variety series, Necromancers of the Public Domain, and the world premiere of Greg Kotis’ new musical, I AM NOBODY. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 11 ) |

The Graphic Novel Adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

in Books, Comics/Cartoons, Literature | February 6th, 2020

Since its publication just over half a century ago, Slaughterhouse-Five has seen bans and burnings, gone through various adaptations, and all the while held its place in the American literary canon. Something about Kurt Vonnegut’s story of the involuntarily time-traveling optometrist Billy Pilgrim, who like his creator survived the firebombing of Dresden in the Second World War, continues to resonate with readers even as that war (and so very many novels about it) pass out of living memory. Vonnegut himself loved George Roy Hill’s 1972 film of the novel, but alas, having died in 2007, he didn’t stick around long enough to see Slaughterhouse-Five — or, to use its full title, Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death — turned into a graphic novel.

“Indie graphic novel house BOOM! Studios announced plans to publish a graphic version of Kurt Vonnegut’s classic sci-fi/antiwar novel,” reports Publishers Weekly’s Calvin Reid, naming the adaptors as writer Ryan North, artist Albert Monteys, and colorist Ricard Zaplana. Nerdist’s Matthew Hart writes that it’s “unclear at this point what’s been included and what’s been dropped for BOOM!’s Slaughterhouse-Five graphic novel adaptation, it seems like the story is in good hands.” [Update: You can now purchase a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five graphic novel online here.]

The images released so far “showcase a world painted with appropriately muted colors, and populated by some of the most iconic moments from the novel. The graphic novel’s interpretation of Billy Pilgrim will possibly ignite some disagreement amongst readers, however, as his face can be juxtaposed with Vonnegut’s.”

For a novel considered a “classic” longer than readers who discover it today have been alive, Slaughterhouse-Five has its own unconventional way with reality. Not only does Vonnegut make its protagonist “unstuck in time,” he also works into its cast real characters from his own life. Take Bernard O’Hare, shown here in panels from the graphic novel. As Vonnegut’s officially designated “buddy” in the the 106th Infantry Division, O’Hare was taken prisoner along with him in Dresden and held captive in a meatpacking plant known as Schlachthof Fuenf. When Vonnegut completed the manuscript he let O’Hare and his wife Mary read it, and the latter urged the author to write about how “all the men who fought in the Second World War were just babies.” Hence the novel’s subtitle, which befits the plainspoken sensibility of Kurt Vonnegut, a man who believed in calling things what they were — and thus would surely have rejected the label “graphic novel” in favor of “comic book.”

Purchase a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five: The Graphic Novel online.

via Publishers Weekly

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Terry Jones, the Late Monty Python Actor, Helped Turn Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Into a Free App: Explore It Online

in Education, Literature, Technology | February 5th, 2020

People’s eyes tend to glaze over when they hear the phrase “digital humanities.” Granted, it’s not the most thrilling combination of words. But when you show them what’s possible at the intersection of technology and the arts, the glaze turns to a gleam: a Shazam-like app for scanning, identifying, and learning about fine art? Yes, please…. An iPad app introducing the works of Shakespeare, with contextual notes, summaries, essays, and videos featuring Sir Ian McKellen? Fascinating….

The possibilities for casual learners and serious students alike are vast. You just have to know where to look. And if you’re looking for a tech-savvy way into Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the classic medieval story cycle written in Middle English verse and prose, you’ve found it. Thanks in part to medieval scholar Terry Jones, formerly a member of Monty Python—and the writer and director of Monty Python and the Holy Grail—we now have a Chaucer app.

“The project… features a 45-minute audio performance of the General Prologue of the Tales,” writes Henry Bodkin at the Independent. “While listening to the reading, users have access to a modern translation, explanatory notes and a vocabulary explaining Middle English words used by Chaucer, as well as a digitized version of the original 14th century manuscript.” The project was Jones’ final scholarly work—he passed away last month—but his contribution is significant.

Jones’ two books on Chaucer and his translation of the “General Prologue” are both featured in the app’s introduction and notes, as Ellen Gutoskey notes at Mental Floss. One of the project’s leaders, Peter Robinson of the University of Saskatchewan, also points to his behind-the-scenes influence. “His work and his passion for Chaucer was an inspiration for us. We talked a lot about Chaucer and it was his idea that the Tales would be turned into a performance.”

We can enjoy many a modern English translation of Chaucer, and there’s nothing wrong with doing so, but to truly understand what made the text so revolutionary, we should hear it in its original language. Middle English is beautifully musical, but it was not in Chaucer’s time a literary tongue. Like Dante, he broke new ground by writing in the vernacular when most everyone else wrote in Latin or French.

The strangeness of Middle English to our eyes and ears can make approaching the Canterbury Tales for the first time a daunting experience. The Chaucer app is an excellent research tool for scholars, yet the researchers want “the public, not just academics to see the manuscript as Chaucer would have likely thought of it,” says Robinson, “as a performance that mixed drama and humor.” In other words, reading Chaucer should be fun.

Why else would Terry Jones—a man who knew his comedy as well as his medieval history—spend decades reading and writing about him? Find out for yourself at the Canterbury Tales app, where, with a click of a few buttons at the top of the page, you can see part of the original manuscript, a transcription of the Middle English text, explanatory notes, and Jones’ translation of the “General Prologue.”

Enter the app here.

via Mental Floss

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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