The Guardian reports that the British Library has made its archive of world and traditional music available online. And it’s free for everyone. What might you hear? “There are Geordies banging spoons, Tawang lamas blowing conch shell trumpets and Tongan tribesman playing nose flutes. And then there is the Assamese woodworm feasting on a window frame in the dead of night.” You might also check out the British Museum’s free online image database. Here you’ll find thousands of images of paintings, etchings, drawings, and artifacts from every country and era of human history, easily searchable by era, country, artist, or subject. In using the database for dissertation research, I also found copyright permissions relatively easy to acquire.
British Museum Sound Archive
Yes, More Eggers on the Way
Once again, another Dave Eggers novel is coming with barely any notice. Knopf will publish Eggers's latest, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?, on June 17. The title is longer than the plot description, but the new novel will follow a man named Thomas who interrogates a NASA astronaut about their connection.
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Bytegeist
This week Margaret Atwood tweeted a photo of her and Alice Munro drinking champagne in a "secret lair." There's no denying it — technology has changed the way we tell stories. Atwood and 16 other writers, from Victor LaValle to Lee Child, discussed how technology influences their work in The New York Times. "There’s nothing worse for plots than cellphones. Once your characters have one, there’s no reason for them to get lost or stranded," Rainbow Rowell said.
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Bibliomania
Time to confess: what books have you stolen?
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Kathleen Alcott on the Writing Life
At the Rumpus, Kathleen Alcott provides a poignant recollection of what she inherited as a writer from her father: “And is it worth it? Was it for my father, is it for me, for nearly every writer I’ve met, whose default answer is ‘Yes’?”
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Unknown Parables
“The rest of her speech to the U.N. that day is an exact outline for what she wanted the rest of the Parable books to be about — a way out that she did not live to write herself.” For Electric Literature, Kristopher Jansma explores the unwritten Parable books of acclaimed sci-fi author Octavia Butler. Pair with our consideration of Butler’s novel Kindred.
Books, Faced
It's not all Kindles and ebooks and the death of print media out there: the book-themed social media site Goodreads is exploding in popularity, perhaps solving the "discoverability" problem of digital reading.
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