Tantor Media has a new recording of A Princess Of Mars and it’s narrated by the very popular Scott Brick. They’re offering the first chapter as an MP3 download for account holders.
And the sale price right now is just $9.99.
On a side note, isn’t it nice to see that Phobos has grown out of it’s awkward potato shaped adolescence and blossomed into a nice Mercury shaped moon?
Posted by Jesse Willis
Available through OverDrive, NetLibrary, and Audible.com – or you can request your library get a give them this “ISBN 9780983089872”!
Upon the Dull Earth and Other Stories
By Philip K. Dick; Read by William Coon
Digital Download – Approx. 4 Hours 18 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Eloquent Voice, LLC
Published: January 31, 2012
When an interviewer asked Phillip K. Dick “What is the most important quality for a writer to have?” he replied “A sense of indignation… A writer writes because it’s his response to the world. It’s a natural process, like respiration… The capacity for indignation is the most important thing for a creative person. Not the aesthetic capacity but the capacity for indignation… And especially indignation at the treatment afforded other people. To see some of the things that are going on in the world and to feel indignant…That is the basis of the writer.” Whatever it was that stimulated his creative juices, we are the lucky beneficiaries, as demonstrated in this collection of five stories, all first published in 1954. In “Exhibit Piece” a long-suffering museum worker becomes a little too attached to his display of mid-twentieth century lifestyle. In “Upon the Dull Earth” a young man refuses to let go of his soul mate, and he creates a chain reaction that he couldn’t have anticipated. In “Progeny” one man’s idea of how to raise a child is challenged by new, more scientific techniques. “The Last Of The Masters” explores a post-apocalyptic world, where anarchists don’t just occupy Wall Street, they occupy the entire planet. Finally, in “Breakfast At Twilight”, a family awakes to find theirs is the only house left on their street, and they are forced to make the most important decision of their lives.
Posted by Jesse Willis
The 2011 Nebula Nominees have been announced. Sfsignal has a good collection of links to free online text of the shorter works. I’ll list all the available audio versions. I think it’s just from Clarkesworld and Lightspeed (I found a few others). Clarkesworld should make it easier to go from their online text versions to their online audio versions. Jenny says listen to E. Lily Yu first.
Best Novella:
Catherynne M. Valente – Silently and Very Fast (Clarkesworld) – Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
Best Novellette:
Jake Kerr – The Old Equations (Lightspeed) – |MP3|
Best Short Story:
Adam-Troy Castro – Her Husband’s Hands (Lightspeed) – |MP3|
Tom Crosshill – Mama, We are Zhenya, Your Son (Lightspeed) – |MP3|
E. Lily Yu – The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees (Clarkesworld) – |MP3|
Ken Liu – The Paper Menagerie (Podcastle) – |MP3|
Nancy Fulda – Movement (Escape Pod) – |MP3|
Posted by Tamahome
I’ve been looking for an excuse to begin reading Emily Brontë‘s Wuthering Heights!
Now I’ve got one.
This excerpt from the novel works well on it’s own, and makes up the bulk of chapters IV, V, and VI.
I found it in a great uncopyrighted (and undated) kid’s book from the mid 20th century called The Crackerjack Book For Girls!
I love these old collections, they combine terrific illustrations with a level of intelligence that’s hard to find in modern kid’s books.
What I’ve actually done here is taken the story’s text and images |PDF| and matched them up with the terrific solo narrated audiobook as performed by the talented Ruth Golding for LibriVox. Or to put it another way I abridged the public domain audiobook of Wuthering Heights to match the text as it appears in The Crackerjack Book For Girls. Here’s the |MP3|.
I should also point out that the complete audiobook of the novel is HERE).
Before you listen, read, or watch the video check out the introduction to Cathy And Heathcliff as it appeared in The Crackerjack Book For Girls:
Emily Brontë was one of three sisters – all if them writers – who lived in the first half of the nineteenth century. Their father was a clergyman and their home was Haworth Parsonage, a bleak, rather forbidding house with the gravestones if the churchyard on one side and the wild, desolate Yorkshire moors on the other.
Their lives were spent in this lonely little village if the West Riding, and the Yorkshire character and landscape colour all their writings. Emily, particularly, loved the windswept, moorland country which surrounded their home, and Wuthering Heights, her only novel, owes its sombre, fascinating atmosphere to the background if her life.
Of the three sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, only the work of Charlotte gained recognition in the author’s lifetime; but now, a century later, we recognise the true genius if Emily. The beauty of her poetry, and the power and dramatic quality if her novel far excel anything written by her sisters (even Charlotte’s masterpiece, Jane Eyre).
Wuthering Heights relates the histories of two neighbouring Yorkshire families, the Lintons and the Earnshaws, through three generations; and the changes if fortune brought upon both of them by the chance action if Mr. Earnshaw, which is described in the excerpt from the book which follows. The strange little foundling boy grows up to be the principal actor in the drama. This is Heathcliff, a character drawn with a power and assurance which at once mark Emily Brontë as a great English writer.
(The story is told in the first person, and is taken up in turn by minor characters in the book. Here Nellie Dean, an old family servant, is telling the story.)
And here’s the afterword:
This incident marked the close of a chapter in Heathcliff’s life. The Cathy who came back to Wuthering Heights had changed beyond his recognition; her stay with the Lintons had turned her into an elegant young lady with fine clothes and manners. In bitter disappointment and despair, Heathcliff fled. Years later he returned, a grown man. Hatred and a desire for revenge had taken complete possession of him, and his one reason for living had become vengeance upon Hindley.
Posted by Jesse Willis
Recently released by Audio Go, it’s the audiobook of the Hard Case Crime paperbook:
The Comedy Is Finished by Donald E. Westlake
Available as an MP3 Download, CD or on Audible.com.
The year is 1977, and America is finally getting over the nightmares of Watergate and Vietnam and the national hangover that was the 1960s. But not everyone is ready to let it go. Not aging comedian Koo Davis, friend to generals and presidents and veteran of countless USO tours to buck up American troops in the field. And not the five remaining members of the self-proclaimed People’s Revolutionary Army, who’ve decided that kidnapping Koo Davis would be the perfect way to bring their cause back to life… This is the final novel from legendary writer and Mystery Grand Master Donald Westlake!
And We’ll be talking about The Comedy Is Finished in an upcoming podcast READALONG!
Posted by Jesse Willis
The SFFaudio Podcast #147 – Pickman’s Model by H.P. Lovecraft, read by Mr Jim Moon. This is a complete and unabridged reading of the short story (21 Minutes) followed by a discussion of it by Jesse, Tamahome, Mr Jim Moon, Wayne June and Mirko Stauch. Here’s the ETEXT.
Talked about on today’s show:
S.t.a.u.c.h., comic book explosion sounds, “thwip”, Pickman’s Model by H.P. Lovecraft, Hypnobobs Podcast, Hypnogoria.com, Jim Moon’s audio essay about ghouls, R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Amicus Press, Beyond The Grave, The Monster Club, The H.P. Podcraft Podcast, The Tomb, The Call Of Cthulhu, The Crawling Chaos, The Music Of Erich Zann, The Festival, nobody wants to talk about art, Neonomicon, Pickman’s Necrotica, Night Of The Living Dead, Richard Burton, the German audio drama adaptation, The Thing On The Doorstep (annotated by S.T. Joshi), I Am Providence: The Life And Times Of H.P. Lovecraft, The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward, Robert E. Howard, Omar Epps, House, M.D., “no nordic man”, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, lead-lined coffins, a slurry of sauce, “the lesson”, “subway accident”, The Dream Quest Of Unknown Kadath, Bradford Dillman, “for procreational purposes”, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Unnameable, Gustav Dore’s illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, the power of art, Supernatural Horror In Literature, Aristotle’s Poetics, Algernon Blackwood, YogSothoth.com, What The Moon Brings, a ghoulish sense of humor, Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith, eldritchdark.com, Out Of Space And Time, Cotton Mather, spectral evidence, the original waterboarding, The Horror At Red Hook, He, Audio Realms, The Mountains Of Madness, Through The Gates Of The Silver Key, The Statement Of Randolph Carter, two one sided conversations, what would Lovecraft write today?, The Lovecraft Chronicles by Peter Cannon, Lovecraft’s racism, Mr. Nigger Man (Lovecraft’s cat), racist paint colours, WWII, xenophobia, the strange and the stranger, Samuel Loveman, mythologizing the author, Buck Rogers, Doc Savage, Poe himself is the star of The Raven, laughing in horror, the Night Gallery paintings, Hannes Bok, a wolf with a mullet, a modern adaptation, The Rats In The Walls, if a story can be spoiled it’s probably not worth reading (or re-reading), Tam would have dropped his shit, Joanna Russ, Cthulhu 2000, Poe wrote his wife to death, Beyond The Wall Of Sleep, The Crawling Chaos, “psychedelically cosmic”, Jim Moon’s Necronomicon woodcuts, 16th century Pickman,
Posted by Jesse Willis