Category Archives: Media
Karavansara Free Library update
Shanghai Jazz from the ’20s
Karavansara Free (Audio) Library
Ultrafast post to direct you to OpenCulture’s huge list of 900 free audiobooks, featuring fiction and non fiction, and poetry too. Listen to Christopher Lee reading The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyl and Mr Hyde, or Orson Welles as The Shadow, and tons of others, from HPL to Arthur C. Clarke to the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Merry Christmas and season’s greetings!
Karavansara U. – first courses
When you have a good idea (or one you think is a good idea), you better put it in practice as soon as possible. Hesitation is a trap. So, I mentioned my idea to present a selection of courses the readers of Karavansara might be interested in taking, using online platforms.
The rules of thumb (we can’t really call them by-laws) of the Karavansara University are quite simple:
- free online courses
- related to the topics we usually cover on this blog: adventure & historical fiction, fantasy & pulp, history, the East, the Silk Road, and the whole wide world
And with this in mind, here’s a first selection of five courses that might kindle your curiosity…
Continue readingThe Beast with Five Fingers
As a Christmas gift, I’ve just received a copy of W.F. Harvey’s collection The Beast with Five Fingers, a massive volume featuring fifty odd-stories by this lesser known British practitioner of supernatural and horror fiction.
A Quaker, Harvey had a degree in medicine and had served as a surgeon during the Great War, and writing was not his main career until his early retirement in 1925, aged 40, due to ill health (his lungs had been damaged during a rescue operation at sea during the war). The Beast with Five Fingers is probably his best-known short story, it was originally pyblished in The New Decameron in 1919, and gave the title to the author’s second collection, published in 1928.
In case you are interested, you can read it in Famous Modern Ghost Stories, a fine collection from the ’20s you can download for free as an ebook on the Project Gutenberg (and that features also Algernon Blackwood, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert W. Chambers and Ambrose Bierce, among many others).
And while I am waiting to find the time to read this beauty, last night I went and watched the movie featuring Peter Lorre that in 1946 was based on the Harvey story, and on a script by Curt Siodmak. And here’s my impressions.
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