Listening to authors read from their own works is a much better idea on paper than in reality.
But these are some damn fine authors, and those are some damn fine works. The quality of the audio’s pretty bad, sadly.
Paul Auster’s got an awesome gravelly Joe Frank-ish radio voice — he’s an NPR contributor and the author of some of my favorite books — so check out his excerpt from The Book of Illusions. Philip Roth also does a great job. The Mary Gaitskill story is incredible, her reading, not so much, so here’s an excerpt in text. Read the whole thing if you can find it.
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Laurable used to be a great time-waster for browsing through poetry audio files. Sadly a lot of links are dead now, but it’s still got some good stuff.
W. H. Auden is definitely a little disppointing in some of his readings; sometimes he doesn’t seem to be remember exactly what he wrote. On the other hand, when he slips things up, you could see it as insight into the creative process…
Of course, the Favorite Poems Project is a nice source for readings, though not by the original authors.
More time wasters:
Various poetry
Don’t forget the Ramayana Monkey Chant