A few months ago I wrote a “Sightings” column for The Wall Street Journal called “Hearing Is Believing” in which I took note of the release by the British Library of a series of CDs devoted to talks by and interviews with W.H. Auden, Graham Greene, George Bernard Shaw, Evelyn Waugh, and H.G. Wells that were originally broadcast over the BBC. Now comes a pair of three-disc samplers devoted to archival recordings of broadcasts by other writers, most of whom who didn’t make it into the studio often enough to fill up a full CD.
The Spoken Word: American Writers contains recordings by James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Pearl Buck, William S. Burroughs, Raymond Chandler, Ralph Ellison, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lillian Hellman, Patricia Highsmith, Sinclair Lewis, Anita Loos, Mary McCarthy, James Michener, Arthur Miller, Henry Miller, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Eugene O’Neill, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Gertrude Stein, John Steinbeck, William Styron, James Thurber, Gore Vidal, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, and Thornton Wilder.
The Spoken Word: British Writers contains recordings by J.G. Ballard, Algernon Blackwood, Anthony Burgess, John le Carré, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Noël Coward, Ian Fleming, E.M. Forster, William Golding, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, Rudyard Kipling, Doris Lessing, Arthur Machen (who he?), Somerset Maugham, Daphne du Maurier, Nancy Mitford, the Baroness Orczy (she wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel), Joe Orton, Harold Pinter, J.B. Priestley, C.P. Snow, Muriel Spark, J.R.R. Tolkien, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, Angus Wilson, P.G. Wodehouse, and Virginia Woolf.
Two questions:
(1) Where the hell is Max Beerbohm?
(2) What are you waiting for? Place your order!
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Incidentally, iTunes offers downloads of some interesting spoken-word recordings by famous writers of the past:
• For Kingsley Amis, search for “A Song of Experience/Nocturne.”
• For John Betjeman, search for “The Church’s Restoration/The Olympic Girl.”
• For G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Leo Tolstoy, and W.B. Yeats, search for “The Very Best Historic Voices.” (This album also contains a counterfeit recording that purports to be the voice of Oscar Wilde.)
• For T.S. Eliot, search for “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
• For Robert Frost, search for “Robert Frost Two Poems.”
• For Rudyard Kipling, search for “Reflections on War.”
• For Philip Larkin, search for “An Arundel Tomb/Mr. Bleaney.”
• For George Bernard Shaw, search for “Public Address on His Ninetieth Birthday.”