Guy de Maupassant – Page 10

Recent Arrivals: AudioGo: H.P. Lovecraft’s Book Of The Supernatural edited by Stephen Jones

SFFaudio Recent Arrivals

Recently arrived, and currently being soaked in through my skin and ears, is this giant collection of weird fiction. Assembled from a list of stories found in H.P. Lovecraft’s essay Supernatural Horror In Literature, it is a collection of well known and obscure classics by authors that H.P. Lovecraft loved.

Looking at the table of contents I noted that I’d already read several of the stories in this collection – including The Turn Of The Screw (we did a podcast about that one), the engimatic Christmas horror Markheim, the scientific ghost tale What Was It?, the unutterably creepy and horrific The Voice In The Night very recently, and many years ago, perhaps in high school, The Yellow Wallpaper. But even though I’ve read some of these stories already I’m still very excited. Each of the stories seems to be preceded by some relevant words by Lovecraft himself – and at the very least I will be listening to the mini-introductions to those stories I am well familiar with.

Until then I will content myself in listening to the unknown ones. For example, the frightful first person narrative of Who Knows? by Guy de Maupassant is thrilling and wondering me in the exact same way The Horla almost exactly one year ago. It’s wonderful!

H.P. Lovecraft’s Book Of The Supernatural
Edited by Stephen Jones; Read by Bronson Pinchot, Stephen Crossley, Davina Porter, Madeleine Lambert, Mark Peckham
MP3 DOWNLOAD – Approx. 16 Hours 44 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: AudioGo
Published: August 1, 2012
Written by arguably the most important horror writer of the twentieth century, H.P. Lovecraft’s 1927 essay Supernatural Horror in Literature traces the evolution of the genre from the early Gothic novels to the work of contemporary American and British authors. Throughout, Lovecraft acknowledges those authors and stories that he feels are the very finest the horror field has to offer: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, Guy de Maupassant, Ambrose Bierce, and Arthur Conan Doyle, each prefaced by Lovecraft’s own opinions and insights in their work. This chilling collection also contains Henry James’ wonderfully atmospheric short novel…The Turn of the Screw. For every fan of modern horror, here is an opportunity to rediscover the origins of the genre with some of most terrifying stories ever imagined.

Here’s the table of contents:
Introduction by editor Stephen Jones – Approx. 7 Minutes
Notes on Writing Weird Fiction By H.P. Lovecraft – Approx. 11 Minutes
The Tale of the German Student by Washington Irving – Approx. 14 Minutes
Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson – Approx. 49 Minutes
Who Knows? by Guy de Maupassant – Approx. 34 Minutes
The Invisible Eye by Erckmann-Chatrian – Approx. 41 Minutes
The Torture by Hope by Villiers de l’Isle Adam – Approx. 15 Minutes
Ms. Found in a Bottle by Edgar Allan Poe – Approx. 29 Minutes
What Was It? by Fitz-James O’Brien – Approx. 34 Minutes
The Middle Toe of the Right Foot by Ambrose Bierce – Approx. 24 Minutes
The Turn Of The Screw by Henry James – Approx. 4 Hours 52 Minutes
The Dead Smile by F. Marion Crawford – Approx. 57 Minutes
The Wind In The Rose-Bush by Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman – Approx. 38 Minutes
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman – Approx. 36 Minutes
The Recrudescence of Imray by Rudyard Kipling – Approx. 30 Minutes
The Hands Of Karma (Ingwa-banashi) by Lafcadio Hearn – Approx. 11 Minutes
The Burial Of The Rats by Bram Stoker – Approx. 1 Hour 7 Minutes
The Red Lodge by H.R. Wakefield – Approx. 35 Minutes
The Captain Of The Pole-Star by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Approx. 1 Hour 6 Minutes
The Villa Desiree by May Sinclair – Approx. 28 Minutes
The Voice In The Night by William Hope Hodgson – Approx. 36 Minutes
Novel of the White Powder by Arthur Machen – Approx. 48 Minutes

Posted by Jesse Willis

New Releases: AudioGo: H.P. Lovecraft’s Book Of The Supernatural

New Releases

H.P. Lovecraft’s Book Of The Supernatural
Edited by Stephen Jones; Read by Bronson Pinchot, Stephen Crossley, Davina Porter, Madeleine Lambert, Mark Peckham
MP3 DOWNLOAD – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: AudioGo
Published: August 1, 2012
Written by arguably the most important horror writer of the twentieth century, H. P. Lovecraft’s 1927 essay Supernatural Horror in Literature traces the evolution of the genre from the early Gothic novels to the work of contemporary American and British authors. Throughout, Lovecraft acknowledges those authors and stories that he feels are the very finest the horror field has to offer: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, Guy de Maupassant, Ambrose Bierce, and Arthur Conan Doyle, each prefaced by Lovecraft’s own opinions and insights in their work. This chilling collection also contains Henry James’ wonderfully atmospheric short novel…The Turn of the Screw. For every fan of modern horror, here is an opportunity to rediscover the origins of the genre with some of most terrifying stories ever imagined.

The audio sample says it includes “20 classics of the macabre.” ~~I’ll try to get a list.~~

Here’s the TOC:

an introduction by editor Stephen Jones
Notes on Writing Weird Fiction By H.P. Lovecraft
The Tale of the German Student by Washington Irving
Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson
Who Knows? by Guy de Maupassant
The Invisible Eye by Erckmann-Chatrian
The Torture by Hope by Villiers de l’Isle Adam
Ms. Found in a Bottle by Edgar Allan Poe
What Was It? by Fitz-James O’Brien
The Middle Toe of the Right Foot by Ambrose Bierce
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
The Dead Smile by F. Marion Crawford
The Wind in the Rose-Bush by Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Recrudescence of Imray by Rudyard Kipling
The Hands of Karma (Ingwa-banashi) by Lafcadio Hearn
The Burial of the Rats by Bram Stoker
The Red Lodge by H.R. Wakefield
The Captain of the Pole-Star by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Villa Desiree by May Sinclair
The Voice in the Night by William Hope Hodgson
Novel of the White Powder by Arthur Machen

[Thanks Amy!]

Posted by Jesse Willis

Commentary: The art of book (and audiobook) arrangement

SFFaudio Commentary

I’ve never understood the appeal of the art of flower arrangement – flowers are pretty, and I guess they’re full of symbolism – but other than that I don’t really get the appeal.

On the other hand, I find that whenever I visit someone’s home I’m immediately off and looking at their bookshelves. To me that’s where the real art of arrangement happens.

I happened to do a little of that myself today.

It started yesterday – when I spotted this perfectly good bookshelf being given away! FREE!

Free Bookshelf!

I snapped it right up, dusted it right off, and found a place for it in my apartment.

My New Bookshelf!

Then I policed up various books, and audiobooks, from various other overflowing shelves and arranged them in a handy and functional order.

Arrangement

They’re all basically grouped by author. Some of the books I’ve had for decades, others are quite new.

Here are a few details:

Blackstone Audio - Robert A. Heinlein Audiobooks

Blackstone Audio - Philip K. Dick Audiobooks

Robert E. Howard books and audiobooks

Top shelf - Robert Silverberg, Guy de Maupassant, Robert A. Heinlein, Mark Twain, Full Cast Audio, Edgar Allan Poe

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #155 – READALONG: Five Nebula Nominated Short Stories

Podcast

The SFFaudio Podcast #155 – Jenny, Tamahome, and Jesse talk about the five Nebula 2011 nominated short stories for which there are audio versions.

Talked about on today’s show:

the Clarkesworld one was too quiet (by the way, we use Levelator), April Fools jokes fall out of date, The Cartographer Wasps And The Anarchist Bees by E. Lily Yu, Jenny’s favorite, it’s science and it’s fiction but is it science fiction?, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “nerdy mapmakers”, Ottoman Empire, Jenny is into language, ‘thrumming’, revolution, The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu, Tam was moved to tweet it, Jhumpa Lahiri and first generation Americans, do we need the fantastic part?, Mike Resnic-y, workshop stories, “he’s such a tool”, movie version?, Asian magic realism, the owl on Home Depot, Murakami, Jesse likes Leggos, childhood, Jesse please explain Mama, We Are Zhenya by Tom Crosshill, Tam sounds just like narrator Stefan Rudnicki, quantum mechanics, author’s blog post about the story, intellectual heft, it’s a five year old, Flowers For Algernon, head-eating clouds, Lost, YA novel about singularity, superpowers, and giant robots, author was a nuclear operator, Zhenya is everywhere, and now with a slightly older child — Movement by Nancy Fulda, we’ve read The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time |OUR READALONG|, “temporal autism”, we’ve also read Speed Of Dark |READ OUR REVIEW| so we are autism experts, or Asperger’s?, Daniel Tammet and prime numbers, “she doesn’t want new shoes”, father’s bug killer, (note: here I got E. Lily Yu mixed up with Yoon Ha Lee’s Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain from Sffaudio 120, here’s the full text and audio from Lightspeed), Her Husband’s Hands by Adam-Troy Castro, horror, SUPER CREEPY DO NOT WANT, the hyphen in the author’s name was originally a typo, Chiller Theater, war, The Hand with Michael Caine, Guy De Maupassant, House of Holes by Nicholson Baker, Bianca’s Hands by Theodore Sturgeon (podcasted by Spider Robinson), It by Sturgeon, some story about brains, eyes, and taste buds, Pruzy’s Pot (podcasted by Spider Robinson) has a monster under the toilet that does things, we make our Nebula picks and predictions, a moving story about ponies from last year, Kij Johnson, a story about sex with an alien, which story will be remembered in ten years? Toy Story III with immigrants, we will discuss Among Others by Jo Walton, sexy Welsh accent in the audiobook, Tam’s amazing Welsh accent, waiting for Jo’s series on Hugo-nominated novellas, get off my lawn with your books series’s!, how to find good stories/books, Christopher Priest’s amazing post, anything good after 1950?, Stories by Neil Gaiman and Alan Sarrantonio, The Truth Is A Cave In The Black Mountains |READ OUR POST|, Joe Landsdale on novels

Posted by Tamahome

The SFFaudio Podcast #154 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce

Podcast

The SFFaudio Podcast #154 – Scott, Jesse, Tamahome, Mirko and David Stifel talk about An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce (read by Bob Neufeld for LibriVox).

Talked about on today’s show:
The Devil’s Dictionary, comic irony, an American classic, German drama, Famous Monsters Of Filmland, Sleep No More, Nelson Almstead, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, One Step Beyond, civil war stories, quantum mechanics, The Damned Thing, the genres: horror, ghost, “weird”, “weird war”, “dream”, or SUSPENSE, alternate reality, why is An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge so popular with high-school English teachers?, time perception, not-SF, “the man who was engaged in being hanged”, passivity, “go for it hands”, “a dream story”, David used to have out of body dreams, “stream of consciousness”, subjectivity, Henry James, the radio drama adaptations (Escape, Suspense, CBS Radio Mystery Theater),

“Each year thousands of short stories roll out from a multitude of typewriter, march across the pages of our magazines toward well deserved oblivion. Few are memorable, fewer still are classics. They pass the time and are forgotten even before the paper on which they are written is reduced to black ash. But occasionally a story is written that is a true classic, an unforgettable tale.”

astral projection, H.P. Lovecraft, Accessory Before The Fact by Algernon Blackwood, near death experience, Bierce’s headwound, Sigmund Freud, A Dream Play by August Strindberg, The Horla by Guy de Maupassant, the driftwood, the slowdown of time, it’s a mystery story, a million blades of grass, infinite detail and infinite depth, Isaac Asimov, The Turn Of The Screw, The Twilight Zone version (which was a French short film), what’s with the corporal?, of the body, a hidden pun or joke, it was a setup, a great suspicion of death or dying, the kicking legs = running, unconscious insight result in surprise and relief, the tongue, wish fulfillment, the suspicion begins, naturalistic interpretation, Igor (Son Of Frankenstein), the history of hangings, botched hangings, popping heads, Hang ‘Em High, Braveheart, can it be truly spoiled?, war,

“Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference.”

constitutional rights, the Alfred Hitchcock Presents adaptation, The Twilight Zone short film version, HuffDuffer, CBS Radio Mystery Theater adaptation, “it’s best read”, an audio drama adaptation, impressionism, mapping back, additional scenes, a water moccasin, narration, is it a miracle that the rope breaks, a heavenly Eden like land, gates, Sergei Bondarchuk’s War And Peace, Leo Tolstoy, altered state, (The Crawling Chaos), sex choking, speculative fiction, life passing before you, the telescoping of time, remembering the classics, 100,000 high school teachers, one of the most podcast short stories, O. Henry stories are cute, an existential story, “trapped in a world he never made”, an exegesis.

From Eerie Magazine #23

An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge - Illustration from Smith's Weekly, March 12, 1938

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Flayed Hand by Guy de Maupassant

SFFaudio Online Audio

Guy de Maupassant’s short story, La Main Écorchée (which translates to The Flayed Hand), is a creepy supernatural tale of horror. The title delivers exactly what you might suspect – a gruesome story that doesn’t end at all well for one of the characters. More surprising to me, as compared to W.W. Jacobs’ The Monkey’s Paw, are the characters.

They were not what I expected at all. The story played itself out like a black comedy. Then, in researching the story I learned that in his teens Maupassant was shown, by the poet Algernon Swinburne, a mummified hand!

The Flayed Hand
By Guy de Maupassant; Read by Alan Winterrowd
1 |MP3| – Approx. [UNABRIDGED]
Published: Boomcoach’s Audiobooks
Published: 2009
|ETEXT|
Published under the pseudonym Joseph Prunier, this was Guy de Maupassant’s first short story. It appeared in L’Almanach Lorrai in 1875.

The Weird Circle Weird Circle – The Hand
Based on The Flayed Hand by Guy de Maupassant; Perfomed by a full cast
1 |MP3| – Approx. 30 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Broadcaster: MBS, NBC, ABC
Broadcast: October 14, 1943 or December 19, 1943
A severed hand in a trophy room gets its revenge on the one who cut it off.

CBS Radio Mystery Theater – #0080 – The Hand
Based on the short story The Flayed Hand by Guy de Maupassant; Adapted by Ian Martin; Performed by a full cast
1 |MP3|- Approx. [RADIO DRAMA]
Broadcaster: CBS
Broadcast: April 24, 1974
Source: CBSRMT.com
A postal surprise in the form of a human hand leaves a man convinced of its apocalyptic portents.
Cast:
Mildred Clinton
Ian Martin
Alexander Scourby
Guy Sorel

Here is the splash page from the Classics Illustrated comics adaptation:

Classics Illustrated - The Flayed Hand by Guy de Maupassant

Incidentally, one of my favourite Michael Caine movies, the schlocky 1981 film, The Hand, was probably indirectly inspired by The Flayed Hand:

Posted by Jesse Willis