Mark Nelson’s unabridged narration of A Princess Of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs is available as a set of three YouTube videos:
The uploader, CC Prose, has done something interesting here by combining LibriVox audiobooks with the printed text. I like it!
Posted by Jesse Willis
Mentioned in H.P. Lovecraft’s The Crawling Chaos, and discussed in SFFaudio Podcast #138, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas de Quincey was first published in 1821.
Martin Geeson, the narrator, has written this intriguing mini essay about it for his LibriVox reading.
“Thou hast the keys of Paradise, O just, subtle, and mighty Opium!”
Though apparently presenting the reader with a collage of poignant memories, temporal digressions and random anecdotes, the Confessions is a work of immense sophistication and certainly one of the most impressive and influential of all autobiographies. The work is of great appeal to the contemporary reader, displaying a nervous (postmodern?) self-awareness, a spiralling obsession with the enigmas of its own composition and significance. De Quincey may be said to scrutinise his life, somewhat feverishly, in an effort to fix his own identity.
The title seems to promise a graphic exposure of horrors; these passages do not make up a large part of the whole. The circumstances of its hasty composition sets up the work as a lucrative piece of sensational journalism, albeit published in a more intellectually respectable organ – the London Magazine – than are today’s tawdry exercises in tabloid self-exposure. What makes the book technically remarkable is its use of a majestic neoclassical style applied to a very romantic species of confessional writing – self-reflexive but always reaching out to the Reader.
I’ve combined his narration with two different sets of illustrations and placed the resulting video on YouTube:
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
By Thomas de Quincey; Read by Martin Geeson
1 |M4B|, 16 Zipped MP3s or Podcast – Approx. 5 Hours 22 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: October 16, 2009
First published in September and October 1821 issues of London Magazine.
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Podcast feed: http://librivox.org/bookfeeds/confessions-of-an-english-opium-eater-by-thomas-de-quincey.xml
iTunes 1-Click |SUBSCRIBE|
[Thanks also to TriciaG, Ruth Golding, and Golden Age Comic Book Stories]
Posted by Jesse Willis
The Metamorphosis (in German, Die Verwandlung, “The Transformation”) is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915, and arguably the most famous of his works along with the longer works The Trial and The Castle. The story begins with a traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, waking to find himself transformed into a giant “monstrous vermin”.
This narration by David Barnes is really terrific! One reviewer put it this way: “Slow, dignified, fitting for Kafka.” Another this way:
“A wonderful recording … Many thanks to Mr Barnes for his wonderful reading … [a] nightmarish and chilling tale of horror and abandonment. It is one of the most powerful texts written by Kafka and quite worth listening to.”
Here are the illustrations, and a brief editorial, from the June 1953 publication of Famous Fantastic Mysteries.
The Metamorphosis
By Franz Kafka; Translated by Ian Johnston; Read by David Barnes
3 Zipped MP3 Files or M4B – Approx. 2 Hours 34 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: December 11, 2006
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“Already he had taken the alien loathesome shape … In all except the still watching mind – the vestige of a soul that still could suffer…”
Part 1 |MP3| Part 2 |MP3| Part 3 |MP3|
Podcast feed:
http://librivox.org/bookfeeds/the-metamorphosis-by-franz-kafka.xml
iTunes 1-Click |SUBSCRIBE|
Posted by Jesse Willis
Here’s the LibriVox version |MP3| as ably read by Bob Gonzalez (from the Vintage Verse Rhapsody A Poetry Collection).
The Conqueror Worm
by Edgar Allan PoeLo! ’tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.
Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly-
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Woe!That motley drama- oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore,
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.But see, amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!- it writhes!- with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.Out- out are the lights- out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.
Posted by Jesse Willis
What I’ve done here is combine Anne Cheng‘s LibriVox narration of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven with the Gutenberg.org’s Gustave Doré illustrations for the 1884 Steadman edition of The Raven.
Be sure to view it in 1080p for the full effect.
Posted by Jesse Willis
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