The British Library is releasing two CD sets of dead, great fiction writers doing spoken word shit and rare interviews, and are charging thirty bucks a piece for them.

You can buy them at Amazon. Somebody has to be the first person to buy them for the rest of us.



You can either get the American set or the British set. The faster somebody pirates them, then the faster we can all listen, speculate, comment, and know. Basically, you could kill six fine, productive work shifts with these albums droning merrily in your ears. I bet you could also put out some really vibrant, daring hip hop with the samples you steal if you are into stretching music's meathook back to the days when the world's most incendiary and thought-provoking artists used printed words to get people hot instead of their bare chests or their skill at doing drugs.

Here's what the Brits are holding back:

* The sole surviving recording of Virginia Woolf published in its entirety for the first time

* The sole audio recording of Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes

* P G Wodehouse talks about his most famous characters, Jeeves and Wooster

* J R R Tolkien discussing whether he will be remembered for The Lord of the Rings or his academic career

* Noel Coward throwing off witticisms when interviewed at 6am at Heathrow airport

* Anthony Burgess interviewed as Stanley Kubrick's controversial film of A Clockwork Orange was released

* Harold Pinter speaks to Kenneth Tynan, a meeting of two leading men of the theatre

* Graham Greene talks about playing Russian roulette as a boy

* Joe Orton interviewed a week before he was murdered, observing tragically that a playwright's career is 'very short'

* Ian Fleming's appearance on BBC Radio 4's 'Desert Island Discs'

* Gertrude Stein in the only recording in which she speaks spontaneously, revealing the resemblance between her literary style and her unique manner of speaking

* Rare recordings of two early American winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature: Sinclair Lewis and Pearl Buck

* Eugene O'Neill in a rare private recording reading an extract from Long Day's Journey into Night, in which he reads a speech by Edmund, the character with whom he has been identified in real life

* Raymond Chandler interviewed by Ian Fleming, a meeting of two great thriller writers, and the only known recording of Chandler's voice

* One of only three surviving recordings of the voice of F Scott Fitzgerald

* John Steinbeck discusses his reasons for writing The Grapes of Wrath

* Lillian Hellman reads the letter she wrote to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, a turning-point in responses towards the Committee's anti-Communist investigations

* Tennessee Williams reflects on the ups and downs of a career on Broadway

* Arthur Miller talks about his marriage to Marilyn Monroe

* Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin discuss the position of African-American writers in the United States


HERE'S WHAT YOU DO:

Buy these discs for your significant other for a Winter Holiday. This will get you laid, probably immediately. You can fuck trippingly amongst the wrapping paper to the soothing, bouncy tenor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, you can bite and scratch and shriek along with Gertrude Stein, or or you can pull slow squelches out of your mate to the laconic slur of Arthur Miller as he talks about buying Marilyn Monroe foot cream or what sort of hat she likes to wear while boating. Then, when you are all cleaned up and your sig-oth has fallen asleep (arms akimbo, feet turned inward, big smile) you can turn around and rip these discs and send them to Sweden.

Shoot us an email when you are done! We will dedicate the next story we publish to you, or to a loved one of your choosing.

Thanks! Only ransom the ladies and governors; gut all the rest for chum!

Posted by miracle on Sat, 01 Nov 2008 18:33:15 -0400 -- permanent link