Recommended listening: 19 Rare Recordings of Famous Authors Reading, as compiled by Mental Floss, including the likes of Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway and Flannery O’Connor. For a different perspective on the word “rare” as applied to digital culture, be sure to read Rex Sorgatz‘s recent piece for Medium, “You Need to Hear this Extremely Rare Recording.”
Walt Whitman Reads
Zone One Excerpt
As stated on his website, you can now read the first section of Colson Whitehead‘s forthcoming Zone One. (Scribd). The book will release this October, and it was tapped in our “Great Second Half of 2011 Book Preview.”
Going In
In 2012, the Portuguese writer José Luís Peixoto, on the occasion of Kim Il-Sung’s 100th birthday, went to North Korea for a fifteen-day trip. The experience led him to write a travel memoir, Inside the Secret, which you can read in serialized form online at Ninth Letter magazine. You could also read Pulitzer laureate Adam Johnson’s new Granta essay about the country.
List of Lengthy Books
In honor of our own Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire (which stands at a hefty nine hundred pages), Bethanne Patrick has compiled a reading list of lengthy books at Lit Hub. You could also check out our interview with Hallberg.
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“Here’s to you, old dears. You got this right, every one of you.”
Recommended Reading: Roger Angell describes life in the nineties. His nineties.