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"What the Hell Happened?"

Well it's "best of" season, and the year's best books lists are beginning to roll out, among them the NPR Best Books of 2010; the New York Times' 100 Notable Books list; and AudioFile magazine's Best Audiobooks of 2010 and Best Voices of 2010 lists. In coming weeks, we'll be looking at some of the best of the best that are available on Playaway.

In the meantime, here's a book that hasn't yet shown up on any "best of" lists, but has managed to do reasonably well for itself nonetheless: The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers by Thomas Mullen. If it's not already in your collection, it deserves a look.

This is Mullen's second novel. Both this and the first book were published in print by Random House. Neither book has made the best-seller lists, but each has been a modest mid-list success.

Mullen's debut book, The Last Town On Earth (2006) is on quite a few library shelves. According to WorldCat, about 1,400 libraries hold the print. Over 800 libraries have the audiobook on cassette or CD, and almost that many also have access to the downloadable version from Net Library. (Incidentally, it's also available on Playaway from Recorded Books.)

Somehow the second book, published in January of this year, hasn't caught on with readers to the same extent, despite having captured some pretty positive reviews -- including from the New York Times. It seems destined to be a movie someday, however, so don't be too surprised if interest continues to grow.

Truth be told, it is rather an odd book, concerning itself with the strange story of two bank-robbing brothers who, for reasons they do not understand, find themselves back alive after being killed by the police. The year is 1934, and the brothers' names had been high on the FBI's list of public enemies -- right after John Dillinger.

Reviewers have dubbed the book "magical noir" and a "folktale," and these descriptions may be as good as any. But it's something more as well -- a morality tale about the very hard times of the past and the hard times that may lie ahead.

With 17 bank heists and 5 murders to their names, Jason and Whit, the story's archetypical 30's-era bank robbers, are, archetypically, just on the verge of going straight. Shot dead in an ambush they don't remember, the next thing the pair knows, they are waking up in a police station morgue, unable to account for being alive again. "Shake's a man's unfaith," says one of them. They briefly wonder if they are perhaps in some kind of surreal Flan-O'Brien-type hell, but more practical questions press to the fore. For example: "What are we going to tell ma?"

An amnesiac mystery unfolds as they trace back the turn of events that led them to the morgue. Repeatedly they ask, "What the hell happened?"

And that's exactly the same question the characters and the narrator repeatedly ask about the country as it enters the very worst years of the Great Depression -- what the hell happened? The landscape of the book is littered with boarded up factories, ghost towns, homeless wanderers, and evicted families squatting in the foreclosed houses of their neighbors. They are harder times than the ones in which we now live, but hints of the present day are everywhere: "So many foreclosures, so few buyers."

Despite the current popularity of the living dead, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers is not a zombie book. Rather, it's a very clever, playful investigation of "normalcy" (that classic Depression-era word, invented by Herbert Hoover to describe the good old days) versus the grim new reality of the 1930's. That two machine-gun-toting bank robbers should rise from the dead, the book seems to suggest, isn't any harder to believe than anything else that happened to the country in those years.

Arguably, this is the kind of story that -- in the hands of a skillful narrator -- is actually more enjoyable as an audiobook than on the printed page.  Tantor Audio's production features just such a narrator -- William Dufris, whose praises I've sung elsewhere.  His voice has a warmth like an old vacuum-tube radio that perfectly evokes the era of the story.

By all means pay attention to those "best of" lists. But don't forget some of those underappreciated works that didn't make the lists -- The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers is one such gem.

 

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
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Boy Bites Dog, Dog Says "Ow"

What is it about a talking dog? I don't even like dogs, but I'm a sucker for one that talks.

Ever since Harlan Ellison's 1969 short story, "A Boy and His Dog," the futuristic talking pooch has been something of a sci-fi staple (witness the recent graphic novel from Adam Hines, Duncan the Wonder Dog).

And it makes good literary sense: you can get only so much mileage out of an animal character that's mute -- it makes for pretty thin dialog. But give man's best friend the gift of speech, and you've got a winning formula.

And that's just the first of many charms on offer from The Knife of Never Letting Go, the first title in the Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness.

Though not nearly as high-profile as Scholastic's blockbuster Hunger Games series, The Knife of Never Letting Go (September 2008) and its two sequels, The Ask and the Answer (September 2009) and Monsters of Men (September 2010) have been building a substantial following among fans of Young Adult speculative fiction, and all three are now available on Playaway.

A recent check of WorldCat showed that roughly 2,700 libraries now hold the print edition of The Knife of Never Letting Go (compared to over 5,000 that have The Hunger Games in print -- plus another 1,500 listings for CD, audio download, and Playaway). What are all those fans of Katniss and Peeta supposed to do once they've finished Mockingjay?

The answer offered by many teen librarians is: try The Knife of Never Letting Go. I see this title turning up more and more in listserv discussions as a worthy "read-alike" suggestion for young readers captivated by Suzanne Collins' creation and ready for more futuristic dystopias.  The third and final book in the series, Monsters of Men was just named one of the Best Children's Books of 2010 by Publishers Weekly (alongside Mockingjay).

In addition to being tremendously statisfying entertainment, The Hunger Games series gave thoughtful readers a lot to chew on. Patrick Ness offers readers further opportunities to engage some of the same difficult issues -- truth and trustworthiness; loyalty; privacy; the control of information, and the importance of history. And he does so by means of a captivating story with well-developed characters and relationships and inventive re-workings of old themes such as human settlement on foreign worlds; mental telepathy; and of course, the talking dog.

I first became aware of The Knife of Never Letting Go when its name came up repeatedly in a thread about "Books That Made You Bawl Your Eyes Out". One commentator on the YALSA-BK listserv, described Ness' trilogy as "more complex, layered and complicated than The Hunger Games."

Indeed, Ness puts forward some pretty challenging concepts and then explores them rather deeply over the course of the entire series. As one of the characters inThe Knife of Never Letting Go explains: "It's a long story."

Elsewhere in listserv discussions, there was much evidence that advanced reader copies for the third book (Monsters of Men) were in high demand. There appears to be strong consensus about the great character development -- both male and female -- throughout the series and the extremely satisfying quality of the conclusion. Don't tell me about it -- I haven't gotten there yet!!

The audiobook versions of the Chaos Walking books are part of the first batch of offerings to flow from the alliance formed earlier this year between Candlewick Press, a wonderful independent publisher of books for children and young adults, and Brilliance Audio, which in recent years has shown great dedication to turning out audio editions of some of the best new fiction and nonfiction for young readers.

Fans of other Brilliance Audio productions for young people may recognize narrator Nick Podehl who has given voice to Brent Crawford's Carter Finally Gets It (which I've written about previously), John Green and David Levithan's Will Grayson, Will Grayson, and Don Calame's Swim the Fly (also a Candlewick title). Podehl has a knack for capturing the tone and mindset of adolescent boys and can use this in both comic and non-comic ways. He also does a very good talking dog.

The second and third books in the series are multi-voiced, and Podehl is joined by Angela Dawe onThe Ask and the Answer and by Angela Dawe plus MacLeod Andrews on Monsters of Men. Ness employs some unusual stylistic tricks to represent the "noise" of men's (but not women's) minds -- the thoughts and feelings that spill out and can be perceived by others ever since the release of a mutant germ by alien adversaries (at least that's the story as received by the young protagonist, Todd Hewitt). The audio production renders these "noise" effects very successfully, thanks in part to the skilled narration and in part to the creativity of the audio producers.

As imagined by Ness, putting out "noise" is a condition with both good and bad aspects. He makes his readers wonder what it would be like to not hear someone's thoughts when hearing them is what you're used to. And he asks his characters and his readers: what if everything you thought you knew was wrong? "Knowledge is dangerous!" says one of Todd's protector's early on. At another point he naively asserts, "History ain't that important when you're just trying to survive!" "Actually," an older, wiser voice counters, "that's when it's most important."

And did I mention? There's a talking dog.

 

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

Beautiful Darkness Giveaway HOM + 100 = SATC?

Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl have captured a lot of attention among young -- and not-so-young -- fans of mystery and paranormal romance.  With the paperback edition of last year's Beautiful Creatures still on the New York Times best seller list for young people, the brand new sequel, Beautiful Darkness, joined the list on October 22nd.  

Garcia and Stohl weave a complex tale of a sleepy southern town where things are not all as they seem.  Beneath the surface are subterranean passageways, dark secrets, and family curses.  Throw in some witchy magic, a teenage love affair, a strong, dangerous heroine, and a sensitive young man with a keen appreciation of his girlfriend's fashion sense, and you have a story guaranteed to please young readers and quite a few grown-ups as well. 

A third installment of what is now being called "The Caster Chronicles" is expected next year, as is a film version of Beautiful Creatures.

Both books are available on Playaway, and it turns out that the authors are huge Playaway fans.  They are currently offering visitors to their website a chance to win one of five copies of Beautiful Darkness on Playaway.  The contest ends on Sunday November 7.  As of this writing, there were only about 40 entries, so the odds are attractive.

 

 

Did you catch last week's edition of Studio 360 from WNYC in New York and Public Radio International?  As part of their ongoing "American Icons" series, they examined Edith Wharton's 1905 novel The House of Mirth.  If you missed the broadcast, you can listen to the show online.

Edith Wharton's career spanned more than 40 years. She published her first book of verses in 1878 at the age of 16. She wrote 22 novels, 3 books of poetry, 13 short story collections, and 9 works of non-fiction. The House of Mirth was her fourth novel and her first major hit. Published in 1905, when Wharton was 43, it sold 140,000 copies in its first year -- a huge best seller at the time.

Wharton lived in France during the First World War and wrote numerous dispatches (including from the front lines) for Scribner's magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, and The New York Times. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature -- in 1920, for The Age of Innocence.

105 years later, The House of Mirth continues to have a devoted following, and as Studio 360 host Kurt Anderson asserts, it still "feels strangely modern."

The story takes place in New York City just before the turn of the 20th Century and just before the book's central character, Lily Bart, turns 30 without yet having married. The book follows smart, witty, beautiful Lily in her relentless quest for a husband and a solid marriage that will secure her position in the privileged society of the Gilded Age.

Studio 360's Anderson and segment producer Michele Siegel, draw numerous parallels between the world presented in House of Mirth and that depicted in Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City (published in 1996). They argue that Bushnell -- like Wharton -- is a commentator on the world of New York privilege and power. Deborah German, a lecturer at London's Roehampton University, is quoted as saying that the two writers moved "in similar circles 100 years apart."

Though much has changed for women in the past 100 years, the similarity of themes is striking -- simultaneous fascination and revulsion with the workings of high society, a yearning for security but also a desire for independence, gender inequity, and the complexities of what marriage represents both practically and symbolically.

In fact, Bushnell herself goes so far as to acknowledge that she and a close friend had read The House of Mirth shortly before she began work on Sex and the City and that the two had vowed never to end up like poor Lily Bart. For Bushnell, the message in Wharton's work is that, "if you are kind of hoping that in some way you're going to be saved by society -- you really may not be."

As professor of American Literature, Hildegard Hoeller puts it, a century after The House of Mirth's publication, readers still identify with Lily because "most of us are quite entrapped ourselves."

We have two excellent versions of The House of Mirth available on Playaway as well as Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City, narrated by Cynthia Nixon.  I think they would make a great pairing for a book discussion group.

For more on The House of Mirth, visit Studio 360's "American Icons" page, where you'll find a slide show on Wharton and a web-extra interview in which Jonathan Franzen discusses The House of Mirth with Kurt Anderson and explains why its one of his all-time favorite books.

 

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

Fall 2010 News and Notes

      From SaveNYCLibraries.org
The frost is on the pumpkin (so to speak), a parade of Zombie librarians is about to cross the Brooklyn Bridge (really), and 2010 is drawing to a close. I'd thought I'd use this week's post to look at a couple of the year's most-hyped predictions and to present a few items of assorted "news and notes."

Although sales of e-books have been climbing throughout 2010, a number of big announcements from early in the year have yet to be fully delivered upon.

In late September, Blio's long-awaited launch left most observers a bit "underwhelmed". In my opinion, the basic interface is very strong -- as everyone has known it would be since seeing the earliest demos.

But many people were disappointed when the roll-out came considerably later than expected and was at first available for only a single operating system -- Windows.

To make matters worse, the initial title offerings were far fewer in number than had been expected (10,000 titles -- nothing to sneeze at but not nearly what's offered by Amazon or B&N).  And, in some cases, Blio titles were more expensive than the competition.

Reviewers were likewise disappointed by Blio's over-hyped text-to-speech (T2S) capabilities. Unfortunately, it's implementation of T2S fails to improve upon existing robo-talk performance, such as is offered by the Kindle. But anyone expecting narration comparable to a human reader was being naively optimistic.  For visually impaired people, however, the point is not to replace human readers but merely to gain better access to the millions of books that are available only as text.  For these people, Blio T2S will be a major plus.

The real promise of Blio's speech integration is not its current implementation of robot-like synthetic speech but rather its ability to smoothly sync professionally produced audio to the text displayed on screen.  It remains to be seen if publishers will be interested in offering combo e-book/audiobook content (or if consumers will be interested in paying for it), but if the interest is there, Blio provides the capability.

It also remains to be seen how publishers will respond to the software and services for converting to Blio format. Blio seems to be doing all it can to make this process painless, but it's clear that their client software is still evolving, and this is likely to also be the case for their authoring tools.

Lastly, the current Blio business model only addresses consumers. We'll have to wait till next year (at least) to see what Blio intends to do for libraries.

Announced early in 2010 but not yet materialized is Google Editions -- potentially the most game-changing of all e-book developments once it finally gets here. Google denies that the roll-out is dependent on a successful conclusion to the ongoing Google Book Search law suit.  That case isn't about  the sale of brand-new e-book titles to consumers but rather about Google's right to sell access to scanned library editions of so-called "orphan works".   But despite the denials, I'm not aware of any other reasons having been offered for the delay in Google Editions, so I tend to believe that there are connections.

In the meantime, a visit to the service currently known as Google Books gives one a little idea of what's in store. And when the time comes for a full launch of Google Editions, you can bet that the Big G won't make the mistake of rolling it out to only a single OS.

For some clues as to where all this might eventually be heading, I recommend two recent online posts: an interesting overview of the three newest and biggest e-book platforms (Blio, Google Editions, and Copia) by publishing guru Mike Shatzkin; and from Steve Leveen (CEO and co-founder of the Levenger catalog), the most level-headed comparison of print books to e-books that I have yet to come across.

Of course, 2010 was also going to be the year in which we would be flooded with Android tablet devices. Maybe next year.  They are doubtless still coming -- they just haven't gotten here yet. Barnes and Nobles' announcement earlier this week of a $249 Android-based color touchscreen Nook is probably a sign that more inexpensive devices are on their way.

Elsewhere in the news... 

Sony's announcement earlier this week that they were discontinuing production of the cassette Walkman made a lot of people my age stop and think about the first time they ever saw one of these devices and how impressed they were. I think a lot of us were equally surprised to discover that the production halt hadn't occurred already and that they were actually still being made.

This is one more sign that the days are numbered for library collections of audiobooks on cassette. Throughout the year, we've heard from more and more public libraries telling us that they have finally begun intensive weeding of their cassette collections -- or in many cases have eliminated the collections entirely. The shelf space is just too valuable and -- in most communities -- the drop-off in circulation has been very steep. What substitute will libraries offer to older patrons who have been sticking with cassettes? Many are finding that Playaway is an ideal replacement.

 

Gwyneth Jones as seen on YouTube Speaking of libraries and the future, we were delighted to hear school librarian extraordinaire Gwyneth Jones (aka "The Daring Librarian") extolling the many benefits of Playaway on last Sunday's edition of Bob Edwards Weekend from XM Radio and Public Radio International.

Our own marketing department couldn't have offered a more thorough summary of Playaway's benefits for school libraries and classrooms. I also like what Jones had to say about new technology "enhancing but not replacing" older formats -- such as the printed book. And I was highly amused by her pronunciation of "Target" as "Tarjhzay".

If you missed the show, you can listen online to parts one, two, and three of the series "SHHHH... Libraries At Work!" (Gwyneth Jones is featured in Part 3.)

 

 

 

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

Loud Noises in Oslo

Giant anacondas in the sewers of Oslo?

Corporate espionage and theft of intellectual property?

A limitless, renewable fuel source that might propel humanity to the stars?

I'm getting ahead of myself.

You may not have heard of Jo Nesbø, but he's actually one of the most popular writers in Norway, where he has sold over 1.5 million copies of his eight "Harry Hole" detective novels.

After 10 years of writing crime novels, Nesbø took up the challenge of children's fiction. The result, in 2007, was Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder, an irresistibly funny short novel set in modern-day Oslo.

Since 2001, Bruce Coville's Full Cast Audio has been turning out magnificent multi-voiced productions of great contemporary children's literature as well as a few "modern classics." There are more than 80 unabridged Full Cast titles available on Playaway .

For the last couple of years, in addition to its trademark full-cast productions, FCA, under the imprint of "Full Cast - OneVoice", has also put out a handful of titles that are narrated by a single, versatile reader. Two of these OneVoice titles -- Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder and A Dog On His Own -- make use of the prolific and extremely talented narrator William Dufris. The Doctor Proctor book launched on Playaway in September. and I confess that the title caught my eye. But it was with slight trepidation that I started to listen.

The fart jokes begin about 12 minutes in -- that is if you don't count the comical tuba music that introduces the production. I hasten to point out, however, that the phenomena caused by the miraculous invention of the eccentric Doctor Proctor, though extremely loud, are non-odorous, and likewise, the humor manages to steer clear of being overly raunchy.

This isn't the first kid's book to take on the subject of flatulence, and I daresay it will not be the last. And really, why should it be?  After all, the subject is a proven crowd-pleaser.

In fact, the book is full of humor, and most of it is non-scatological in nature. In addition to the topics I noted at the outset, the story deals with:  the true meaning of Norwegian Independence Day; big, angry men in gigantic gas-guzzling Hummers; schoolyard bullying; marching bands; and the longest car chase in Norwegian history.

Akershus Fortress on the Oslofjord
Dufris has a field day with the material, producing a wide array of goofy voices and displaying perfect comic pitch in his interpretation of the carefully constructed story. I don't know how it reads in Norwegian, but credit must be given to translator Tara Chace, who renders it very smoothly into an extremely entertaining narrative in English.

With a run time of about 4 hours, this would be a perfect kid's audiobook for a car trip. The two heroes are 10-year-old Lisa and the new arrival to her neighborhood, a boy of the same age named Nilly. It's difficult to imagine a boy or girl between the ages of 8 and 12 who would not find this story engaging and highly amusing -- potentially just the ticket for reluctant readers. And if someone encourages them to find Oslo on the map, they might even learn a little bit of geography.

 

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

The Bureaucracy of Hell

       Max McLean as Screwtape onstage. Coming to Cleveland! Three shows only!

That's what listeners to Cleveland Public Radio (90.3 WCPN) have been hearing now for several weeks. An original stage adaptation of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters rolls into town this week, and the promos have been describing it as "hilarious" and "devilishly funny".

Those descriptions caught me a little off guard -- this is C.S. Lewis, right? Just how funny could it be? So I decided to give a listen to Blackstone Audio's unabridged recording of this short work, first published in print in 1942.

The stage show by all reports is quite true to the original, which is written as a series of 31 letters from a senior demon named Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood, a junior "tempter," serving in a gigantic Satanic bureaucracy. The elder devil (undersecretary of an entire department) offers advice and criticism to his young relative, who is engaged in the task of corrupting the soul of an Englishman referred to by Screwtape only as "the patient".

There is considerable dry humor in the depiction of humanity's temptation by evil as a project strategically managed by a vast hierarchical apparatus that speaks in corporate and governmental jargon. But clearly Lewis was focused on serious business and intended his work as a commentary on humility and pride and as an examination of the banality of evil. Central to Screwtape's tutelage of his nephew is the notion that bringing souls to the devil is actually rather easy work.

The bureaucratic metaphor is apt. Lewis wrote in an age when bureaucracy was exploding -- in democracies every bit as much as in the worlds of fascism and communism. And, it must be admitted, Christianity has always been replete with its own imagery of lives weighed in the balance, books of account, and strict judgment.

Lewis was also writing at a time when the world was convulsed by a global war that demanded consideration of good and evil. The wartime mentality is present throughout the book -- via direct reference as well as in the sense of struggle between Screwtape and his associates with the inexplicably loving force to whom they refer as "the enemy".

I can scarcely think of a better reader for this project than veteran British narrator Ralph Cosham. In Cosham's hands, the work is humorous, but he doesn't read it for laughs. Rather, he plays it entirely straight and lets the material do the work, rendering it completely accessible for anyone interested in engaging Lewis' ideas -- whether from the perspective of a Christian believer or merely as someone interested in serious reflection on the meaning of a life well lived.

The laughs in the stage show are supplied in large part by the mute antics of Elise Girardin, the only performer on stage other than the show's star and co-creator, Max McLean, who, as Screwtape, holds forth rather more theatrically than does Cosham. You can listen to McLean online as he discusses this production with Dee Perry of Cleveland public radio.

For more about the theatrical adaptation of Screwtape and its current four-city tour, visit the Fellowship for the Performing Arts website.

Whether or not it's coming to a stage near you, the original is well worth listening to. Each of Screwtape's letters is about five minutes long as read by Cosham -- the perfect length for consumption and reflection in small doses.

The Blackstone audio edtion also includes a 30-minute reading of Lewis' essay "Screwtape Proposes a Toast," completed shortly before Lewis' death in 1963.

 

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

Masters of Sci-Fi: Theodore Sturgeon

We frequently hear from librarians and library patrons that they'd like to see more science fiction on Playaway. Fortunately, audio publishers are hearing the same thing, and a number of them are turning out a substantial volume of classic and contemporary sci-fi.

Blackstone Audio is doing an especially good job of releasing high-quality productions of classics from the Golden Age of sci-fi -- many of them in audio for the first time ever.

Blackstone's classic authors include Robert A. Heinlein, Richard Matheson, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury. And earlier this year they released the best-known work of a true Golden Age legend, More Than Human, first published in 1953 by Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985).

Hardcore Golden Age fans may be familar with "Sturgeon's Law," promulgated by the author in 1951: "Ninety percent of science fiction is crud, but then, ninety percent of everything is crud."

Under his own name and various pseudonyms, Sturgeon published 11 novels and dozens of short stories. The 13th and final volume of his collected short works (edited, since 1994, by Paul Williams) was just released earlier this month by North Atlantic Books of Berkeley, CA.

Fans of the original Star Trek series, may also recognize Sturgeon as the writer for two of the most famous episodes: "Shore Leave," which features characters from Alice in Wonderland and "Amok Time," in which the strange mating habits of Vulcans are explained and in which the famous words "Live long and prosper" are uttered for the first time.

Sturgeon was the inspiration for Kurt Vonnegut's crotchety, chronically unsuccessful scribbler of sci-fi pulp, "Kilgore Trout". The two writers knew each other slightly in the early 50's, and the Trout character has shown up in numerous Vonnegut novels over the years, as author of such made-up works as Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension and The Gospel From Outer Space.

Weirdly, the Trout character has even jumped authors and is referred to in The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie.

Over time, Vonnegut's Trout became a parody of Vonnegut himself rather than just a stand-in for Sturgeon. Despite his creative genius, there are clear reasons for Trout's lack of success. "Jesus -- if Kilgore Trout could only write!" says Elliot Rosewater in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five.

The real-life Sturgeon experimented with something he called "rhythmic prose" -- prose which shifted into poetic meter and was thereby supposed to cause a subtle change in mood without the reader necessarily even noticing.

I don't know if you'll be able to hear this rhythmic shift on the Blackstone version, but what you will hear is two different narrators: accomplished audiobook reader Stefan Rudnicki and the legendary and prolific sci-fi author Harlan Ellison. (Ellison has actually narrated about a dozen Blackstone titles, including his quirky -- and decidedly un-British -- reading of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass.)

The abrupt change in voicing is perhaps fitting, since Sturgeon orginally composed this work as three separate novellas. Rudnicki reads Part I in his smooth and slightly ominous sounding baritone. Part II shifts suddenly and without explanation to the first-person narration of a previously unintroduced character, and this is where Ellison takes over with his scratchy-sounding voice and occasional loud (but in-character) gasps for air. In Part III, Rudnicki returns, as does the third-person point of view.

1953 Paperback Cover Tied together in the form of a longer work, the three separate sections of More Than Human do form a unified whole, though it may take a good long time before the reader will be able to figure out where it's all going and how it all fits together. But that's really what the whole book is about -- parts fitting together to make a larger, more complex whole or gestalt.

More Than Human is an almost perfect example of Golden Age sci-fi (broadly defined as the pulp fiction work of the 1930's through the 1950's). There aren't any spaceships, aliens, or death rays, but there is a quintessential post-WWII sensibility: fascination with the rapid change of the era, curiosity about what it means to be human, a psychoanalytical perspective, and a serious interest in a new morality for the atomic era. And -- lest you be disappointed by the lack of flying saucers, laser guns, and malevolent computers -- rest assured that there is telepathy, telekinesis, and an anti-gravity device.

Trout was a parody; Sturgeon was the real thing. For fans of mid-Twenthieth Century sci-fi More Than Human is a must.

 

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

50 Years Old and 56 Hours Long - Rise and Fall Still Relevant

I remember it well: the very fat book with the black dust jacket and the big black swastika in a white circle on the spine. It was William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Originally published in 1960 by Simon and Schuster, it sat on one of my parents' bookshelves for my entire childhood. It loomed large in many family libraries, just as World War II itself loomed large (directly or indirectly) in just about every aspect of popular culture during those years.

For people of a certain age, the subject still looms large, even 65 years after the war's end and 50 years since the publication of Shirer's book.

My good friend Neil Derrick is one such person, as is his partner Edward Field. Together, under the name of Bruce Elliot, the two of them wrote The Villagers, a magnificent, sweeping epic spanning two centuries in the life of a New York family.  

They both love history -- in particular the history of those years that left such a mark on them. Edward was in the war, flying bombing missions over Germany when he was little more than a kid. Neil was a little younger.

Neil lost his sight many years ago and is a big consumer of audiobooks, so I thought he would take notice when the first-ever audio edition of Shirer's book was published this July by Blackstone Audio and launched on Playaway September 1st.

The book runs over 1,000 pages, and the audio is 56 hours long -- though interested myself, I knew I wouldn't be listening to the full production anytime soon. I turned instead to Neil, who was undaunted and readily agreed to listen and share his impressions. Here's what he had to say:

I was 14 when the Second World War ended, so with all the Hollywood movies and newsreels, Hitler and the Nazis were a big part of my fantasy world, and have continued to be ever since. Although I have always been a devourer of books about the period, this book is filled with material I didn't know before. An American correspondent stationed in Berlin and Vienna through the whole Hitler period until we entered the war at the end of 1941, Shirer, who wrote this book in 1959, also had full access to the German archives after the war.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is dominated by World War II. Shirer makes clear that many of Hitler's generals and subordinates knew that the war was lost after the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943. But they were in such awe and so frightened of their Fuhrer that they and their troops went on following his maniacal orders to the end. This led to the unnecessary sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of his troops, civilians under Allied bombing, and the murder of millions of Jews for another two years.

It's all here -- the rise of Hitler in the bierkellers of Munich, his early obsession with his young cousin who killed herself because of it and her replacement by Eva Braun, the spectacular Nazi rallies, Kristallnacht and the Holocaust, the 1944 conspiracy against him that came so close to succeeding -- it's 56 hours long, but I didn't skip any of it. Whenever I dozed, which is inevitable for me sometimes when lying on my bed listening to audiobooks, I went back to catch up. For me, this story of ultimate evil will always be fascinating.

William Shirer in 1961.It should be noted that a share of the credit for holding listeners' attention has to go to veteran narrator, Grover Gardner. This is just the sort of book Grover likes to sink his teeth into, and he carries the listener with him, on the whole long journey.

Shirer's book is definitely an investment in time for any reader, but now that it's finally available in audio, it's an investment that many in the "greatest generation" will, I think, be willing to make. Winner of the 1961 National Book Award, it's a serious work that has stood the test of time. WorldCat shows it included in the holdings of more than 6,000 libraries. This first-rate audio edition deserves to be a part of any serious non-fiction collection. And if you're concerned about shelf space -- all 56 hours fit onto a single HD Playaway.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

'Burn a Qur'an Day' Canceled, 'Banned Books Week' Still On

Banned Books Week is September 25th through October 2nd.  Held annually for the past 28 years during the last week of September, the event is intended to celebrate the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment.  Principal sponsors are the American Booksellers Association; the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression; the American Library Association; the American Society of Journalists and Authors; the Association of American Publishers; and the National Association of College Stores.  The event is also endorsed by the Library of Congress' Center for the Book.

This year, Banned Books Week (BBW) gets underway with the reverberations of pastor Terry Jones' recent plans for barbecuing the Qur'an still all around us.  Traditionally, BBW is a time when we try to get people to read books rather than burn them, and happily, pastor Jones decided at the last minute to scuttle his planned bonfire in Gainesville, Florida.

What could be funnier than an ordained minister publicly burning, in the United States of America, the sacred text of another religion?  In addition to it making a mockery of American values of religious freedom and tolerance, think of the carbon footprint of such an inflammatory event!  We've got enough environmental problems as it is!  If only it were satire rather than reality... 

It reminds me of the Simpsons episode in which the Rev. Timothy Lovejoy presides over a public burning of Krusty the Clown toys.  ("Now, we are going to set this pile of evil ablaze," says the Reverend before striking a match, "but because these are children’s toys, the fire will spread quickly, so please stand back and try not to inhale the toxic fumes.")  Rev. Lovejoy, is of course, also famous for driving his "book-burning-mobile" -- taking mobile services to a peculiar new extreme.

Actually, the recent incident in Gainesville isn't so funny at all.  Really, it's a stark reminder of how little most Americans know about Islam. 

The featured books of BBW are often works that have been widely read.  But the Qur'an is a book that most folks in the U.S. have never opened -- although the quality of public discourse might be improved if more of us did.

So what better time to stock up on the Playaway English-language edition of the Qur'an?  For the devout, the Quran can only be accessed as a holy text in its original Arabic form -- any translation is an "interpretation" and not the holy word of Allah as transmitted to the prophet Mohammed.  However, for non-Arabic speakers interested in learning more about the foundations of Islam, Englishman Kevan Brighting's beautiful reading of the English-language translation makes the text engaging and accessible.

For those interested in hearing an Arabic recitation of the Qur'an, a full version is available on Playaway.

Also of note is The Qur'an: A Biography by Bruce Lawrence.  Launched on Playaway in September 2009, Lawrence's book was one of the initial titles in the Atlantic Monthly Press "Books That Changed the World" series.  Lawrence, who is a distinguished historian of religion at Duke University, describes the origins of the Islamic faith and examines its widespread and varied presence around the world.

According to the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom, "at least 46 of the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century have been the target of ban attempts."  Of those 46, here are the two dozen currently available on Playaway:

1984 - George Orwell   

All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

The Call of the Wild - Jack London

The Color Purple - Alice Walker

A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway

For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway

The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

The Jungle - Upton Sinclair

Lady Chatterley's Lover - D.H. Lawrence

Lord of the Flies - William Golding

Naked Lunch - William S. Burroughs

Native Son - Richard Wright

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey

A Separate Peace - John Knowles

Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut

Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence

The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston

Ulysses - James Joyce

When books are outlawed, only outlaws will have books.  Happy Banned Books Week!

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta

Ill Fares the Land / Tony Judt, Farewell

The late author Tony Judt took the title of his final book from a line by Oliver Goldsmith, the 18th century Irish writer, poet, and physician remembered mostly for his 1766 novel The Vicar of Wakefield, his 1771 play, She Stoops to Conquer, and the children's tale The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes.

The "Ill fares the land" quote comes from his 440-line poem, "The Deserted Village" (1770):

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.''

At least half a dozen other authors have borrowed the same couplet for their books. Google Books lists:

Ill Fares the Land: the Consequences of Homelessness and Chronic Poverty for Children and Families in New York City by the Bank Street College of Education (1991);

Ill Fares the Land: Essays on Food, Hunger, and Power by Susan George (1984);

Ill Fares the Land: Land-use Management at the Urban/Rural/Resource Edges by the British Columbia Land Commission(1976);

Ill Fares the Land: the Famine Planned for America by Dan P. Van Gorder (1966);

Ill Fares the Land: a Play in Three Acts by Patrick McLoughlin (1957);

And probably most famously:  Ill Fares the Land: Migrants and Migratory Labor in the United States by the great writer, activist, and longtime editor of The Nation magazine, Carey McWilliams (1942).

It seems only fitting for Judt's work to be part of such a long lineage.  As a historian, he knew well that the ideas he grappled with have deep roots -- extending back at least to the era of Goldsmith himself.

Judt's book was published this past March. He died in August of complications from ALS ("Lou Gehrig's Disease") with which he had been diagnosed in 2008. Since late 2009, the affliction had paralyzed him from the neck down.  But in October of that year he was still able to give a 2-hour lecture at NYU (where he had served on the faculty since 1987) on the history and future of social democracy. (A video and transcript are available online).

Ill Fares the Land grew out of that lecture, and in his introduction, Judt acknowledges the "unusual circumstances" under which it was written and thanks the small army of assistants who made it possible.

Judt's concern is the abandonment, over the past 30 years, of decades of progress in promoting social welfare and egalitarianism. From the late 19th century through the 1970s, he argues, the U.S., Britain, and the nations of western European all moved in essentially the same direction -- regulating economic activity, developing social welfare programs, promoting economic mobility, and narrowing the gap between rich and poor. Most of the history of the 20th century was marked, he says, by this more or less steady march toward greater social equality.

The long liberalizing trend ended, however, at the start of the 1980s when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher swept into office and set in motion a wave of privatization and deregulation and began the unraveling of decades of social legislation.

While the first three-quarters of the 20th century saw the gap between rich and poor shrink steadily, in the years since Reagan and Thatcher, economic inequality in Britain and the U.S. has grown to the point where the ratio of rich to poor is now comparable to that found in India and China.

The retreat from social democracy, says Judt, has continued for 30 years without pause, through the Clinton and Blair administrations and up to the present day, transforming the public mindset along the way.

Ill Fares the Land is his attempt to explain that "something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today" and to help us beyond a condition in which we are "unable to conceive any alternative". A lifelong teacher, Judt said he wrote the book "for young people on both sides of the Atlantic," and he speaks eloquently of just how much his students care about the world but "how inadequately we have prepared them."

Judt quotes from Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Maynard Keynes, and Malcom X in his attempt to explain where we are, how we got here, and how we might possibly revive that spirit of egalitarianism, the demise of which he details quite thoroughly, along with its attendant consequences.

Inter-generational economic mobility, for example, has deteriorated sharply. In comparison to the mid-20th century, today's poor are more far more likely to remain poor, and their problems are growing worse as the former social safety net is picked apart. As the book's title suggests, in Judt's view, hardship for so many is unsustainable.

The "symptoms of our collective impoverishment are all about us," says Judt, the result of "a collective failure of the will" that prevents us from recognizing the problems we face and robs us of the ability even to imagine any alternative way of organizing our society. And that's precisely what he calls for -- a new way of thinking about the role of the state and the organization of society.

Our fundamental problem in Judt's view is a "discursive" one -- our inability to "debate our shared interests." The remedies he suggests, while sometimes short on detail and sounding (as such remedies often do) like crying in the wilderness, are nonetheless a serious attempt to offer intellectual tools for the revival of a meaningful political debate about the future course of our society. For Judt, as a scholar and educator, the process must begin with renewed study of and appreciation for the accomplishments of 20th century social democratic progress. Out of this, he hopes that dissenters from free market fetishism will "find their voice."

The voice of the audio version (from HighBridge Audio) is Englishman James Adams, which seems appropriate for the work of an English-born author. Adams reads Judt's lucid prose smoothly, allowing listeners a chance to seriously engage the author's ideas.

Judt is not the first to put forth such ideas -- Lewis Lapham, Noam Chomsky, and others have been doing it almost from the very start of the 30-year era that Judt laments. But in his final work, Judt has left us a great deal worth considering. It's a book that deserves to endure and a fitting legacy for a brave and eloquent thinker whose insightful observations will be sorely missed.

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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
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Twitter: david_perrotta