This falls under the category, “If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself.” In 1950, when Jack Kerouac released his first novel, The Town and the City, he was less than impressed...
https://www.openculture.com/2024/08/jack-kerouacs-hand-drawn-cover-for-on-the-road.html
Before his signature works like The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, and High-Rise, J. G. Ballard published three apocalyptic novels, The Drowned World, The Burning World, and The Crystal World. Each ...
When Konrad von Megenberg published his Buch der Natur in the mid-fourteenth century, he won the distinction of having assembled the very first natural history in German. More than half a millenn...
James Sowerby was an artist dedicated to the natural world. It thus comes as no surprise that he was also enormously interested in color, especially given the era in which he lived. Born in 1757,...
We’ve all read plenty of literature written in the first person, and plenty of literature written in the third person. The second person, with its main subject of neither “I” nor “he” o...
One occasionally hears it said that, thanks to the internet, all the books truly worth reading are free: Shakespeare, Don Quixote, the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, the Divine Comedy, the Bible. Ca...
There are some words out there that are brilliantly evocative and at the same time impossible to fully translate. Yiddish has the word shlimazl, which basically means a perpetually unlucky person...
https://www.openculture.com/2024/07/tsundoku-should-enter-the-english-language-now.html
One of the busiest, most in-demand artists of the 19th century, Gustave Doré made his name illustrating works by such authors as Rabelais, Balzac, Milton, and Dante. In the 1860s, he created one...
In June of 2014, Harvard University’s Houghton Library put up a blog post titled “Caveat Lecter,” announcing “good news for fans of anthropodermic bibliopegy, bibliomaniacs, and cannibals...
Bargain with the devil and you may wind up with a golden fiddle, supernatural guitar-playing ability, or a room full of gleaming alchemized straw. Whoops, we misattributed that last one. It’s a...
https://www.openculture.com/2024/06/behold-the-devils-bible.html
Stephen King has no doubt forgotten writing more books than most of us will ever publish. But even now, in his prolific “late career,” if you ask him to name his own most favored works, he c...
https://www.openculture.com/2024/06/stephen-king-names-his-five-favorite-works-by-stephen-king.html
In years past, we’ve brought you rare recordings of Sigmund Freud and Jorge Luis Borges speaking in English. Today we present a remarkable series of recordings of the great Russian novelist Le...
In the Louisiana Channel interview clip from 2017 above, the late Paul Auster tells the story of how he became a writer. Its first episode had appeared more than twenty years earlier, in a New Yo...
If you want to appreciate Japanese books, it helps to be able to read Japanese books. It helps, but it’s not 100 percent necessary: even if you’ve never learned a single kanji character, you�...
For Christopher Schwarz, American anarchism isn’t “about bombs and leather jackets; it’s about being an independent designer.” It’s about working outside “massive and dehumanizing ins...
https://www.openculture.com/2024/04/free-download-the-the-anarchists-tool-chest.html