Audiobook

An audiobook (or talking book) is a recording of a text being read. A reading of the complete text is noted as "unabridged", while readings of a reduced version, or abridgement of the text are labeled as "abridged".

Spoken audio has been available in schools and public libraries and to a lesser extent in music shops since the 1930s. Many spoken word albums were made prior to the age of videocassettes, DVDs, compact discs, and downloadable audio, however often of poetry and plays rather than books. It was not until the 1980s that the medium began to attract book retailers, and then book retailers started displaying audiobooks on bookshelves rather than in separate displays.

Etymology

The term "talking book" came into being in the 1930s with government programs designed for blind readers, while the term "audiobook" came into use during the 1970s when audiocassettes began to replace records. In 1994, the Audio Publishers Association established the term "audiobook" as the industry standard.

Philip Ridley

Philip Ridley (born 1964 in East London) is an English artist working with various media.

Biography

Ridley was born in Bethnal Green, in the East End of London, where he lived and worked until moving to Ilford. Ridley studied painting at Saint Martin's School of Art and his work has been exhibited throughout Europe and Japan. He started as both a performance artist and the creator of a long sequence of charcoal drawings called The Epic of Oracle Foster. One drawing from this sequence, "Corvus Cum", portraying a man ejaculating a black bird, was exhibited at the ICA in London while Ridley was still a student and – with calls for it to be displayed behind a curtain – became a cause célèbre. Ridley also started his own theatre group as a student, acting in many of the productions, and made several short art films, including Visiting Mr Beak which starred the veteran actor Guy Rolfe. His short film for Channel 4, The Universe of Dermot Finn, was officially selected for the Cannes Film Festival, where it was a critical success and went on to receive theatrical distribution.

Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski; 3 December 1857 – 3 August 1924) was a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. He was granted British nationality in 1886 but always considered himself a Pole. Though he did not speak English fluently until he was in his twenties (and always with a marked accent), he was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote stories and novels, many with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an impassive, inscrutable universe.

Joseph Conrad is considered an early modernist, though his works still contain elements of nineteenth-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors, including T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner,Graham Greene, and more recently Salman Rushdie. Many films have been adapted from, or inspired by, Conrad's works.

Writing in the heyday of the British Empire, Conrad drew on his native Poland's national experiences and on his personal experiences in the French and British merchant navies to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world, while profoundly exploring human psychology. Appreciated early on by literary critics, his fiction and nonfiction have since been seen as almost prophetic, in the light of subsequent national and international disasters of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The Passion of Darkly Noon

The Passion of Darkly Noon is a 1995 psychological drama-suspense film written and directed by Philip Ridley and starring Brendan Fraser in the title role, and co-starring Ashley Judd and Viggo Mortensen.

The protagonist's name and film title come both from a passage in the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13: "Now we see through a glass, darkly...".

For the film Ridley was awarded the Best Director Prize at the Porto Film festival.

Plot synopsis

Darkly Noon (Fraser) is a young man who has spent his entire life as a member of an ultraconservative Christian cult. He received his unusual name from a passage on The Bible. After a violent altercation that results in the dissolution of the cult and the death of Darkly's parents, a disoriented Darkly wanders into a forest in the Appalachian region of North Carolina and is rescued from exhaustion by a coffin transporter named Jude (Loren Dean) and his friend Callie (Ashley Judd).

Callie nurses Darkly back to health, but Darkly is frustrated by the conflict between his religious past and his attraction to his new companion. Darkly's frustration intensifies when Clay (Viggo Mortensen), Callie's mute boyfriend who builds the coffins Jude sells, returns home after being away for a few days. When Darkly encounters Clay's mother, Roxy (Grace Zabriskie), his internal conflicts grow even stronger. Roxy despises the relationship between Clay and Callie, and tells Darkly that she believes Callie is a witch bent on destroying Roxy's family.

Murray Leinster

Murray Leinster (June 16, 1896 – June 8, 1975) was a nom de plume of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, an award-winning American writer of science fiction and alternate history literature. He wrote and published more than 1,500 short stories and articles, 14 movie scripts, and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays.

Writing career

Leinster was born in Norfolk, Virginia, the son of George B. Jenkins and Mary L. Jenkins. His father was an accountant. Although both parents were born in Virginia, the family lived in Manhattan in 1910, according to the 1910 Federal Census.

He began his career as a freelance writer before World War I; he was two months short of his 20th birthday when his first story, "The Foreigner", appeared in the May 1916 issue of H. L. Mencken's literary magazine The Smart Set. Over the next three years, Leinster published ten more stories in the magazine. During and after World War I, he began appearing in pulp magazines like Argosy, Snappy Stories, and Breezy Stories. He continued to appear regularly in Argosy into the 1950s. When the pulp magazines began to diversify into particular genres in the 1920s, Leinster followed suit, selling jungle stories to Danger Trails, westerns to West and Cowboy Stories, detective stories to Black Mask and Mystery Stories, horror stories to Weird Tales, and even romance stories to Love Story Magazine under the pen name Louisa Carter Lee.