Serial Reader
Serial Reader Blog
New Serials: A cornucopia of updates from Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Dante, Virginia Woolf, Jules Verne and more02/10/2019 · Michael Schmitt · permalink I've been adding oodles and oodles of new books to Serial Reader over the past week or two and really need to take a break to highlight them all, before this becomes a blog post with like three dozen books! (Just checked and we're only at two dozen - whew.) There's a few much-requested books I've finally added (sorry sorry sorry), including Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing" and the remaining installments in Dante's Divine Comedy: The poetry collection in Serial Reader has always been a little lacking so I've been on the hunt for great titles to add. Two new ones to report here, including works from William Blake and Gertrude Stein: Some more perilous choices now available include the next installment in Tarzan's adventures, sci-fi exploits from Jules Verne and Carey Rockwell, and thrilling reads from the early days of America: And finally, there's a handful of new philosophical and religious books to choose from including works by Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Laozi: Serial Reader now features more than 600 titles! If there's any books you'd like me to add, don't hesitate to reach out and let me know. Thanks for your support! |
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Stories of the First World War01/20/2019 · Michael Schmitt · permalink With the introduction of Edith Wharton's A Son at the Front to the public domain, it seemed a good opportunity to highlight the many World War I works available through Serial Reader. They range from autobiographical - like E.E. Cummings' The Enormous Room and Henri Barbusse's Under Fire - to adventurous - such as in John Buchan's Richard Hannay series - to how the shockwave of war impacts those called to fight and their families as Rebecca West, Willa Cather, and Edith Wharton explore. Further reading:
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Stories of Chicago11/15/2018 · Michael Schmitt · permalink 
Map of Chicago, 1938
Journey through Chicago's history - and a bit into a sci-fi future! - with this collection of Windy City books in Serial Reader! They include the unforgettable descriptions of the stockyards from muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair and, from another journalist, a collection of treasured columns emblematic of the city. The big city threatens to overwhelm Caroline Meeber in Sister Carrie, some of the very same pressures Jane Addams sought to save people from through her social programs centered around the Hull House. Finally, Paul W. Fairman uses Chicago as the backdrop to a chilling '50s sci-fi adventure. |
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New Serials: Adventures Around the World & Living the Good Life11/10/2018 · Michael Schmitt · permalink Quite the selection of new books now available in Serial Reader! Travel through Africa in search of Livingstone, or with Mary Kingsley looking for scientific specimens (and smashing down Victorian norms for women). Or head further back in time with Tacitus’ histories. There’s a new play from Henrik Ibsen (author of “A Doll’s House”), novels from the Philippines and the old west, plus the handbook on living the Christian good life “The Imitation of Christ.” Find them all in the Serial Reader app! And don’t forget to request books you’d like to see added soon! |
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New Serials: The Adventures of Arsène Lupin05/06/2018 · Michael Schmitt · permalink A collection of the adventures of France’s beloved gentleman thief and master of disguise Arsène Lupin are now available in Serial Reader! Follow Lupin’s exploits as he robs the rich, evaded justice, seeks hidden treasure, and even takes on Sherlock Holmes, er, “Herlock Sholmes” (ah, copyright). |
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Mary Shelley's Slow Apocalypse02/28/2018 · Michael Schmitt · permalink 
Plague in Phrygia. Engraving by M. Raimondi after Raphael af Wellcome.
Writing in The Millions, Will Wlizlo discusses Mary Shelley's apocalyptic sci-fi novel The Last Man, in which a plague threatens to wipe out humankind. A slow-paced plague, that is. "The obliterating pandemic takes a dreadful seven years to finish us off. Can we imagine a slow apocalypse now?"
Read Wlizlo's full article at The Millions. Further reading:
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New Serials: Father Brown, Gods of Mars, Southern Horrors and more02/10/2018 · Michael Schmitt · permalink I've been adding quite a few new serials lately, in part to support a fun new feature coming soon in the Serial Reader app. Here are eight recently added titles worth highlighting including English mysteries, American atrocities, adventures on Mars and more. Be sure to also check out the Black History Month collection of stories! |
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New Serials: Julius Caesar, The Crux, Alice Adams and more12/10/2017 · Michael Schmitt · permalink Six new serials added this week! A play by Shakespeare that should have been added long ago, a quick Christmas tale, revolutionary thoughts on religion by a founding father and more. |
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New Serials: Tom Jones, Egil's Saga, Up from Slavery, and more12/03/2017 · Michael Schmitt · permalink Nine new serials to announce today! Some captivating biographies, challenging essays, genre-defining science fiction, and more. |
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Dangerous Willows: Tolkien and Blackwood10/24/2017 · Michael Schmitt · permalink 
The eeriness of this lonely island, set among a million willows, swept by a hurricane, and surrounded by hurrying deep waters, touched us both, I fancy. Untrodden by man, almost unknown to man, it lay there beneath the moon, remote from human influence, on the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows... This passage is from Algernon Blackwood's classic weird tale 'The Willows,' in which two travelers are beset upon (possibly) by a hostile nature -- either of this world or from the nebulous Elsewhere. Blackwood's writings would inspire and influence countless authors -- H.P. Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgson, Henry Miller, and Clark Ashton Smith to name a few -- including one fellow Englishman who was a 15-year-old student when "The Willows" was published: J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien would later cite Blackwood as the source for his iconic phrase "the Crack of Doom." More than that though, Blackwood's themes of a malevolent nature -- "the treachery of natural things in an animate world" as Jared Lobdell writes in The World of the Rings -- are found throughout Tolkien's writings. There's the murderous Old Man Willow and his "cunning mazes" in the Old Forest, Mount Caradhras, Mirkwood, Fangorn and the Ents... the list goes on. "Blackwood's evocation of landscape, as with Tolkien's, is unusually convincing," writes Michael D. C. Drout in the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia. Compare Blackwood's passage above with this from The Fellowship of the Ring: A dark river of brown water, bordered with ancient willows, blocked with fallen willows, and flecked with thousands of faded willow-leaves... Beyond homicidal trees, there's Blackwood's Wendigo. A horror from the deep untouched woods, it's "the Call of the Wild personified," as one character describes it, which calls to travelers with a voice that "resembles all the minor sounds of the Bush--wind, falling water, cries of the animals." Drout points out that the Wendigo, "with its dreadful aerial entity and wailing cries from above that cause panic in hearers" may have "contributed to one of the most important sources of terror to be found in Lord of the Rings: the airborne Nazgûl." Here's Blackwood, describing a character having heard the Wendigo's (or its victim's) terrible cry: Scarcely knowing what he did, presently found himself running wildly to and fro, searching, calling, tripping over roots and boulders, and flinging himself in a frenzy of undirected pursuit after the Caller. Behind the screen of memory and emotion with which experience veils events, he plunged, distracted and half-deranged, picking up false lights like a ship at sea, terror in his eyes and heart and soul. For the Panic of the Wilderness had called to him in that far voice. And then Tolkien's Nazgûl: The Nazgûl came again... their deadly voices rent the air. More unbearable they became, not less, at each new cry. At length even the stout-hearted would fling themselves to the ground as the hidden menace passed over them, or they would stand, letting their weapons fall from nerveless hands while into their minds a blackness came, and they thought no more of war, but only of hiding and of crawling, and of death. And as the Wendigo captures, corrupts, and mimics its victims to the horror of their companions, so too do the Nazgûl ensnare others and turn them into wraiths like themselves. Tom Shippey writes one of Tolkien's achievements was opening "a new continent of imaginative space for many millions of readers, and hundreds of writers – though he himself would have said that it was an old continent which he was merely rediscovering." It's delightful to discover that a fellow English writer, Algernon Blackwood, may have had a small part in building Tolkien's rediscovered continent. Further reading:
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