Category: Online Audio

LibriVox: Moon-Face by Jack London

Jesse Willis

Aural Noir: Online Audio

There are few authors worthy of re-writing Edgar Allan Poe – few would dare – and of those few fewer still would succeed in the attempt. Jack London is one such and his short story, Moon Face, is one such success. Sometimes subtitled “A Story Of Mortal Antipathy” this story runs nearly the same length as the Poe story that I think inspired it. I’ve read one essay that argues it was inspired by The Tell Tale Heart, but I think it is another. Sure, the unnamed protagonist may be insane, but I think there’s still something to his lunacy – we can go for decades without encountering our own personal Claverhouse – then one day he will appear – and his mere presence is enough to set one’s teeth on edge.

LibriVox - Moon-Face by Jack London

LibriVoxMoon-Face
By Jack London; Read by Gregg Margarite
1 |MP3| – Approx. 13 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: October 01, 2009
|ETEXT|
First published in The Argonaut, July 21, 1902.

Posted by Jesse Willis

READ: The New Mother by Lucy Clifford (it’s your homework for an upcoming SFFaudio Podcast)

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

The SFFaudio PodcastWe’re going to be recording a discussion for the SFFaudio Podcast this weekend. It’ll be centered around a wonderful, horrible, 19th century short story by Lucy Clifford. It’s called The New Mother.

Our narrator, Heather Ordover from the wonderful Craftlit podcast, has just sent me the file!

Happily it will be included in the podcast, along with our discussion of it, but I thought it might be interesting to share the audiobook with everyone early.

If you do download the audiobook |MP3| (which I’ll keep in my DropBox folder for the next week or so) and have a comment about the story, post it below. If it’s interesting we may refer to it in our discussion. And, for extra credit, we participants are planning on talking about The New Mother‘s relationship to Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and Philip K. Dick’s The Father Thing.

I’ve also put together a |PDF| from the original scans of The Anyhow Stories, Moral and Otherwise (1882) over on Archive.org.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Cinefantastique Spotlight Podcast: Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

Cinefantastique The Cinefantastique Spotlight Podcast (which is somehow connected with the Mighty Movie Podcast) had me nodding in agreement yesterday when I heard their review of Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows. Recorded last year, the show features an hour long discussion that echoed many of the thoughts I had while watching the film. I liked the movie, thought it actually improved on the previous entry in the Downey/Law Holmes/Watson film series, but wasn’t exactly sure what to make of some of the more “fantastique” elements. This podcast mostly sorted me out. Here’s the official description:

Come join Cinefantastique Online’s Steve Biodrowski, Lawrence French, and Dan Persons as they weigh the merits and demerits of this further retooling of a literary classic.

The only part that still has me scratching my head is all the military hardware that’s used in the film. The movie is set in 1891 but some of the guns are about a decade (or two, or three, or four, or five) early.

|MP3|

Posted by Jesse Willis

LibriVox: The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

Set in the Canadian wilderness, The Wendigo, one of the two very highly regarded Algernon Blackwood novellas (the other being The Willows). This story is credited as being the first major fictional work to introduce the titular creature into the public consciousness.

Having heard this audiobook version I think it would make an incredibly affective audio drama. According to my researches there actually was one, recorded for CBC Radio’s 1970s radio drama series Theatre 10:30, but I’ve not been able to track down a copy.

The audiobook narrator, Amy Gramour, does a very serviceable job telling the tale – though to my ear some of her pronunciation sounds a bit off. But, that may be simply the regional accent as Gramour reports her accent as being “Mainly a South of Boston Massachusetts accent with a Northern Maine influence.”

Here’s a turly choice line, from near the end of the story:

“The legend is picturesque enough,” observed the doctor after one of the longer pauses, speaking to break it rather than because he had anything to say, “for the Wendigo is simply the Call of the Wild personified, which some natures hear to their own destruction.”

The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood
An amazingly potent tale... H.P. Lovecraft

The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood - from Famous Fantastic Mysteries, June 1944

The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood - from Famous Fantastic Mysteries, June 1944

The above illustrations come from the June 1944 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries.

LibriVoxThe Wendigo
By Algernon Blackwood; Read by Amy Gramour
3 Zipped MP3 Files – Approx. 2 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: May 11, 2011
|ETEXT|
A hunting party, in the Canadian wilderness, separates to track moose, and one member is abducted by the Wendigo of legend. First published in the 1910 collection The Lost Valley And Other Stories.

Part 1 |MP3| Part 2 |MP3| Part 3 |MP3|

Podcast feed: http://librivox.org/rss/5449

iTunes 1-Click |SUBSCRIBE|

[Thanks also to WYSIWYG and TriciaG]

Posted by Jesse Willis

CBC: Ideas: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

CBC Radio One - IdeasThe Swerve: How the World Became Modern, and its author Stephen Greenblatt, are the subject of the latest CBC Ideas podcast. The Swerve is the story of the recovery of a lost epic Roman poem, by Titus Lucretius Carus, titled On The Nature Of Things – Greenblat makes the case for it being a work that changed the world, made it modern, by bringing ancient philosophy into an age ready for enlightenment. It’s an absolutely fascinating discussion. Host Paul Kennedy, as usual, shows that Canadian tax dollars can be used incredibly well when put in the right hands.

The poem in question is available as a LibriVox audiobook HERE.

And The Swerve: How the World Became Modern is available from Recorded Books (narrated by Edoardo Ballerini).

Here’s the book’s description:

Renowned historian Stephen Greenblatt’s works shoot to the top of the New York Times best-seller list. With The Swerve, Greenblatt transports listeners to the dawn of the Renaissance and chronicles the life of an intrepid book lover who rescued the Roman philosophical text On the Nature Of Things from certain oblivion.

Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late 30s took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic by Lucretius – a beautiful poem containing the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions.

The copying and translation of this ancient book – the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age – fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare, and even Thomas Jefferson.

Here’s the |MP3|

Podcast feed: http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/ideas.xml

Posted by Jesse Willis

LibriVox: The Man In Asbestos: An Allegory Of The Future by Stephen Leacock

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

LibriVoxThere’s a new great narrator working over on LibriVox and his name is Phil Chenevert.

Now when I say new I mean new-to-me, Chenevert has, apparently, been active on LibriVox since 2010. Since then he’s recorded an impressive number of audiobooks. I only discovered that after hearing his newly released, pitch perfect, reading of The Man In Asbestos: An Allegory Of The Future by Stephen Leacock (which is just one section of THIS audiobook).

You can check out all of his narrations HERE – based on what he’s recorded so far Chenevert seems to have a fondness towards children’s literature with several whole single narration audiobooks of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and the Br’er Rabbit stories (which are awesomely accented) as well as a schooling manual (Dr. Montessori’s Own Handbook by Dr. Maria Montessori). But there are a few SF titles in his catalogue too.

LIBRIVOX - The Man In Asbestos by Stephen LeacockThe Man In Asbestos: An Allegory Of The Future
By Stephen Leacock; Read by Phil Chenevert
1 |MP3| – Approx. 27 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: April 16, 2012
A 20th century man travels to the distant future by typical means (eating donuts and reading comics) only to find himself in a museum of the 20th century. The museum’s curator isn’t exacty sure if it’s the year 3000 or not, but he is sure that life is better now that nobody dies, eats, or has a telephone. First published in 1911 as a part of Nonsense Novels.

[Thanks also to April Gonzales!]

Posted by Jesse Willis