We’ve teamed up with New York Times-bestselling author Chuck Palahniuk to offer a free audio download of his short story “Romance,” read by Chuck himself and available in audio exclusively from Blackstone. Originally published in Playboy magazine, “Romance” is a twisted love story like only Chuck could tell.
You’ll need to give your name and your email address to get a link to the 22 minute short story.
I just listened to it. Its pretty funny, really sad, and horrifically frightening!
Its copyright was not renewed within the specified period. This was not generally known previously due to a falsification of the original publication on a 1983 copyright office renewal form (RE190631). The story was first published in the December 1954 issue of Imagination. But the copyright renewal form suggests it was published in the December 1955 issue of Imagination.
It was not.
Here is the evidence:
The table of contents for Imagination, December 1954 (as you can see it includes Strange Eden by Philip K. Dick):
Here is a scanned photocopy of the renewal form:
Here is the table of contents for Imagination, December 1955 – the issue that the renewal form states that Strange Eden was published in. Note that it does not contain Strange Eden:
Strange Eden by Philip K. Dick is PUBLIC DOMAIN.
I’ve made a |PDF| from it’s publication in Imagination, December 1954.
Here’s Julie Hoverson’s reading of Jack London’s A Thousand Deaths, it was the first published story that London was paid for – and it’s Science Fiction. Julie recorded it for us 113 years after it’s first publication (in May 1899) and she did it specifically for your (and my) pleasure. This is a story that really deserves to be heard (and read).
A Thousand Deaths will also be the subject of an upcoming readalong!
Thanks so much Julie!
A Thousand Deaths
By Jack London; Read by Julie Hoverson
1 |MP3| – Approx. 29 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Provider: Julie Hoverson
Provided: May 23, 2012
First published in The Black Cat, May 1899.
Here’s the subject of our next podcast recording, a specially commissioned reading of Cool Air by H.P. Lovecraft. The narrator is one of my very favourites, Jonathan Davis, who will be on the podcast discussing it with us!
The story itself runs 23 minutes. I think it’s the perfect balm for a hot summer day. Check it:
The unnamed protagonist, an underpaid writer of pulp magazines, lives in an oppressively hot New York city apartment. Luckily he makes friends with his convivial upstairs neighbor, who just so happens to own an air conditioner. What a cool guy!
RadioArchive.cc, that wondrous torrent tracker for public radio programmes, is back online. I was getting worried!
Apparently the site was taken down at the request of the BBC. As one commenter pointed out, it’s a case of the ‘left hand isn’t sure what the right is doing’ – how often have we seen stories like THIS?
But, of all the comments, this was the sentiment I liked most:
Thank you all very much for the hard work you put in to running the site. It’s just a brilliant resource all together, and has brought hours of pleasure to my life. Very glad to have you back.
And to make it tangible I’ve just made a $25 USD donation.
If you haven’t yet checked out RadioArchive.cc, then do, it’s brilliant!
Our good friend, Professor Eric S. Rabkin, is teaching one of the free summer Coursera courses. It’s entitled Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World and all of the required readings, except for two of the novels, are available free online!
Here’s the official description:
Fantasy is a key term both in psychology and in the art and artifice of humanity. The things we make, including our stories, reflect, serve, and often shape our needs and desires. We see this everywhere from fairy tale to kiddie lit to myth; from “Cinderella” to Alice in Wonderland to Superman; from building a fort as a child to building ideal, planned cities as whole societies. Fantasy in ways both entertaining and practical serves our persistent needs and desires and illuminates the human mind. Fantasy expresses itself in many ways, from the comfort we feel in the godlike powers of a fairy godmother to the seductive unease we feel confronting Dracula. From a practical viewpoint, of all the fictional forms that fantasy takes, science fiction, from Frankenstein to Avatar, is the most important in our modern world because it is the only kind that explicitly recognizes the profound ways in which science and technology, those key products of the human mind, shape not only our world but our very hopes and fears. This course will explore Fantasy in general and Science Fiction in specific both as art and as insights into ourselves and our world.
This course comprises ten units. Each will include a significant reading, typically a novel or a selection of shorter works. I will offer video discussions of each of the readings and also of more general topics in art and psychology that those readings help illuminate. Each unit will include online quizzes and ask you to write a brief essay offering your own insights into the reading. In order, the units are:
Grimm — Children’s and Household Tales
Carroll — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
Stoker — Dracula
Shelley — Frankenstein
Hawthorne & Poe — Stories and Poems
Wells — The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, “The Country of the Blind,” “The Star”
Burroughs & Gilman — A Princess of Mars & Herland
Bradbury — The Martian Chronicles
LeGuin — The Left Hand of Darkness
Doctorow — Little Brother
In Unit I, the specific stories are the ones in the Lucy Crane translation (1886) which was published by Dover and is available online through Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5314). In Unit V, the specific readings are: Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” and “The Artist of the Beautiful“; Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” “The Bells,” “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee.” All the readings except Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness will be available online at no charge.
Available either as and MP3 or M4B download, Blackstone Audio is offering a FREE download of Romance by Chuck Palahniuk. Sez the Blackstone Blog:
