#thank you formative character Eugène

[i-mybrunettelady]

Just saw a post about realizing you had crushes on certain characters before you know they were crushes and it brought in the forefront of my mind the way I latched onto Eugène de Rastignac the first time I'd read Le Père Goriot when I was 16. Like, it's highkey embarrassing how I didn't realize. I have a lot to credit to that book regarding my current reading tastes, especially my fascination with the young opportunist trope in 19th century literature, but also how's that serving ya now Nero

[subdee]

Paul La Farge - The Night Ocean

This book is a trip and a half!   Thank you, @restekova​​ for the recommendation!

 Since other people have reviewed this better than I ever could, here’s some links to what the book is about:

https://lovecraftzine.com/2017/05/24/review-the-night-ocean-a-novel-of-h-p-lovecraft/

The Night Ocean describes the 21st-century African American writer Charlie Willett’s quest for the lost manuscript of The Erotonomicon, a book he is convinced Lovecraft wrote, in an obscure 18th-century English dialect, to detail his sexual exploits. After Charlie’s research takes a bad turn, he checks himself into a psychiatric hospital, overwhelmed by the fog of research, discovery, and fabrication that surrounds Lovecraft’s writing. The novel is narrated by Charlie’s wife, Marina, a psychologist who seeks to discover what happened to her husband following his mysterious disappearance from the hospital.

https://www.publicbooks.org/monstrous-h-p-lovecraft/

La Farge had already blurred the boundaries of fiction and history in his 2001 novel, Haussmann, or the Distinction, which weaves a fantasy around the 19th-century French urban planner Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. The Night Ocean offers a fresh perspective on this approach, due as much to its form and scope as to the moment of its release. It shows us that research fueled by fandom and admiration can unearth horrors that are far from fictional, but that—in Miéville’s terminology—we may need to metabolize nonetheless. This process, the novel suggests, involves a constant struggle with alternative facts and authentic fictions; while these distinctions may not always be resolved, the effort to disentangle them matters.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/paul-la-farges-the-night-ocean-will-suck-you-into-the-vortex-of-hp-lovecraft/2017/03/02/4d8e1896-ff7e-11e6-8ebe-6e0dbe4f2bca_story.html

[The Night Ocean is] a novel composed of narratives and counternarratives, texts and subtexts. It is both homage to and a sendup of Lovecraft and the 19th-century Gothic fantasies that inspired him. The layering is dizzying. Within Marina’s account lies Charlie’s account of Barlow’s retelling of his relationship with Lovecraft. Within Charlie’s story there are further sources: diaries, letters, recordings, transcripts — some of them red herrings and hoaxes and others seemingly true… Because many of the characters in “The Night Ocean” are writers and editors, they frequently analyze and examine the stories that are told in the book. The result — somewhat frustratingly for a reviewer — is that La Farge has written a self-critiquing novel that seems to anticipate every possible complaint a reader could have.

^^See it’s like a whirlpool, it sucks you in.

My thoughts behind the cut:

So what did I make of this book?   It has stories within stories within stories; reading this is like reading The 1001 Nights.  It’s about HP Lovecraft’s racism, his anti-Semitism, his possible affair with a teenager, and his circle of friends and admirers, a lot of whom are famous themselves.   But that’s just the first 1/5 of the book!  After that it expands to all kinds of other things, other characters.  

On the publisher’s official website, the hook is the central mystery of what occurred between HP Lovecraft, who was 43, and his fan Robert Barlow, also a writer, who was not quite 16 when Lovecraft came to stay with him and his mother at their house in Florida for two months. This is a real story, by the way.  They met several more times in Florida and New York, wrote several stories together, and Barlow was later named as the executor of Lovecraft’s estate.  

All of that sounds very lurid, you know, just extremely suggestive and inappropriate, especially in the current climate and with other well-known writers coming under scrutiny for relationships with teenagers – Oscar Wilde, EL Forrester for example. 

And early on there’s a fake book about Lovecraft’s supposed affair with Barlow – an “erotic diary” called the Erotonomicon - that is completely pulpy and lurid, and (in the fictional world of the book) causes a huge commotion that gets all of Lovecraft’s fans to denounce him… and puts all his associates in the cross-hairs of the House Un-American Committee, under investigation by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI for being queers and communists. 

But the diary of Lovecraft’s sexual exploits with Barlow and others isn’t just fake, but TRIPLY fake: first, because the erotic diary of HP Lovecraft never existed in the first place; second because The Erotonomicon is a fake book even within the world of The Night Ocean; and third because the author of the hoax is a serial hoax-ist, and his elaborately researched hoaxes start a second witchhunt, this time against the journalist Charlie Willett, who believes his side of the story and dares to write about HP Lovecraft and RL Bartlow in a sympathetic way.

***

The real Bartlow, by the way, was an interesting person:

We know some of the things Lovecraft and Barlow did together: they wrote poems and stories, and gathered berries in the woods. They rowed on the lake behind Barlow’s house. What they felt for each other, and how they expressed it, is a mystery. And what’s more, Barlow was a very interesting person in his own right: after Lovecraft died, in 1937, he moved to San Francisco, where he wrote poems, and studied anthropology. Then he moved to Mexico City, and became one of the world’s foremost authorities on the civilization of the Aztecs. He taught the writer William S. Burroughs, whose fiction was influenced by his vision of pre-Columbian Mexico. Barlow was gay, and when his students threatened to expose him, he killed himself, in 1951, at the age of thirty-two.

From the book’s official website http://www.paullafarge.com/tno.html.  The section in the book about Barlow’s career in Mexico is actually longer than the section about him and HP Lovecraft...

***

Anyway, what I make of all this is it’s extremely clever, it reminds me of Alexander Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet in the way the characters, who are writers, offer literary commentary on the action; and in the inclusion of letters, books, interviews, etc within the text.  The subject is inherently interesting and mostly overlooked due to being so taboo and uncomfortable, but how can you possibly write about any of this, even in a non-committal way, without opening yourself up to attack?  I guess Paul La Farge figures out how.  It’s a book about stories, false stories, and the power that stories have.  It has a lot of hallmarks of literary fiction - it even has a story about an affair, the dissolution of a marriage -  and another story about concentration camps and the Holocaust.  These stories have enormous power, that’s why we keep telling them.  

But they don’t have power in the way you’d expect.   A concerned mother calls in about the book that’s sympathetic to HP Lovecraft and Barlow and includes excerpts from The Erotonomicon (stated within the book to be fake).  Her son read it, and now he’s kissing another boy (also 16) and they’re talking about doing The Ablo, a sex act from The Erotonomicon. Ban the book!  The author should die in a fire! Writing about the fake book brings up all the baggage that surrounded it the FIRST time, in 1952.  

Also, even knowing the erotic diary is fake – even knowing that it’s triply fake – the contents don’t leave your mind.  They stay there, like a boarder that doesn’t want to leave.  THAT is the power of fiction, the power of making things up (especially lurid and provocative things) and believing them even when you know they aren’t true.   At the end of the novel, Marina the ‘rational’ psychotherapist says this:

“I thought it might be helpful to write down all the things Spinks told me in Parry Sound, and I have done so, checking my facts as I go, even though I no longer trust facts, and in a way, I no longer even believe in them; but writing has made me aware that, beneath my fear of unreality, there lies another, deeper fear.  What if Spinks has taken me over?  By means of words, I mean.  What if, by listening, I let Spinks into my mind, into my body – what if he lives on in me?   I can’t help noting that in Lovecraft’s novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, the character who finally defeats the evil magus Joseph Curwen is a physician named Marinus: Marinus, Marina.  Mwahaha.  I’ve talked to my therapist about this, of course.  She expresses concern.  Could my fear of being possessed by Spinks be related to some earlier incident we haven’t analyzed?  Do I want to try an antidepressant?  I don’t know, maybe not just yet.  For the time being, I am still hoping to defeat Spinks on my own, even if there is no real way to defeat him, and no real Spinks to defeat…”

Once these false narratives take root they have real power. Or are they false?  Marina keeps trying to psychoanalyze the hoaxer.  She keeps telling herself not to psychoanalyze the hoaxer.  He can’t be defeated that way, and it won’t bring her husband back.  HP Lovecraft will stay racist and anti-Semitic and he’ll stay influential, including over a lot of people who aren’t racist OR anti-Semitic themselves. The hoaxer justifies himself, HP Lovecraft is deserving target.  But it’s not just HP Lovecraft’s reputation that suffers.  Ultimately these hoaxes have effects, they hurt people.  Spinks becomes briefly famous for ‘exposing’ HP Lovecraft’s affairs, falls into obscurity when the hoax is uncovered, and then becomes famous a second time for another hoax.  The only unbelievable thing about all of this is that someone like him, who’s so good at telling stories, and can go to such incredible lengths to research them and tailor them to an audience, is happy to just wait in his house in Canada for someone researching Lovecraft to come and ask for his side of the story. I guess he’s old but this dude should be on the HP Lovecraft subreddit, trolling people.  (Maybe he is.) 

Anyway, this book is really good.  Recommended to all of you who like metafiction, literary genre fiction (specifically sci fi/mystery/historical fiction), books about fandom and books about authors.   

[literastudy]

Ever wanted to start reading French authors and French literature, but never knew where to start? Here is a list of major works that are seen as staples of their movement or era for you to start with. 😋 (This is part 2 of 2, it covers literature after the French Revolution.)

Please note that this selection is arbitrary and not exhaustive, and many more authors and works could be included here, but it was necessary to make choices for the sake of providing a relatively brief but comprehensive list. Titles are provided in their original French version to avoid any confusion.

E. Romantism

Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire Poetry (sonnets and others) 1857

Judged to be scandalous because the author talked about darker subjects, creepy themes or just plain ugly things and glorified them, it is a masterpiece of romantic literature and a very good reference for understanding the movement around the figure of the poet during the 19th century in France.

Méditations poétiques by Alphonse de Lamartine Poetry (alexandrines and others) 1820

Lamartine’s collection of poems is considered by some to be one of the first major works of romanticism, in the form that it was going to take during the 19th century. His work is a great embodiment of the romantic image of love and nature.

Les Contemplations by Victor Hugo Poetry (alexandrines and others) 1856

While he is more widely known for his realist success Les Misérables, Hugo’s poetry is strongly aligned with romanticism and exploits its major themes in a deeply personal way, considered autobiographical by most.

La Mare au diable by George Sand Novel 1846

Don’t be fooled by her pen name, George Sand is a woman. This novel is part of the vogue of pastoral fiction during the 19th century, which is deeply embedded into romanticism by the way it is presented by the author. Lyrical and fantastical, this novel tells the love story of a man trying to break his widowing.

On ne badine pas avec l’amour by Alfred de Musset Theatre (proverb) 1834

On ne badine pas avec l’amour was meant to be a proverbial play, with a light plot and a moral at the end, but Musset’s love quarrel with George Sand as well as his literary influences of the time brought him to make his play move more and more towards the romantic drama genre. A good example of a romantic influence in an otherwise not so romantic piece.

F. Realism

Le Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac Novel 1835

Balzac is the gigantic master of realist literature. His novel depicts the ambitions of Eugène de Rastignac, a young provincial man who came to Paris to study law and decided to pursue a higher social status thanks to his somewhat noble name and the help of Vautrin, a mysterious man living in the same pension as him. Balzac’s care for detail and motivation for every character’s move is clearly laid out in this novel, which is considered by some the foundation of La Comédie humaine.

Germinal by Émile Zola Novel 1885

Germinal tells the tale of the unjust field of mining work in France during the late 19th century and puts in play a workers’ strike against an unfair company’s practices. But this is just a setting to allow Zola to pursue his novels about an infamous curse that runs in the blood of Étienne Lantier.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert Novel 1856

Considered by many to be the masterpiece of classic French literature, Madame Bovary is a novel in which a middle class woman who was dreaming of a better, bourgeois life, lives above her and her husband’s means to trump the ennui, and ends up crumbling in debt, like many people of the time did.

Le Rouge et le Noir by Stendhal Novel 1830

Stendhal’s novel tells the story of Julien Sorel, a young man who falls in love with someone he doesn’t have the right to love and aspiring to a grandeur far above his means. Like Balzac’s books, Stendhal’s novel shows that everything happens for a reason.

Le Horla by Guy de Maupassant Short story collection 1887

Guy de Maupassant is one of the first major authors to give a try at the short story form. His tales had a specific structure with a twist at the end and, like Edgar Alan Poe (who he references explicitly in at least one of his stories), often have a sense of eerie and mysticism around them.

A note on romanticism and realism: Since these currents are contemporary during most of the 19th century, all of the authors presented in both currents are more or less influenced by the other, and some of them are associated with the other current for another part of their work. The classification here is more or less arbitrary.

G. Surrealism

Precursors of surrealism:

Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont Poetry (prose, long form) 1868

Long forgotten by his contemporary readers, Lautréamont was rediscovered by André Breton and other surrealists and was a major influence to their movement, explicitly cited as one of their masters. The plot of this work is surrealist in many ways and doesn’t have a linear progression. Rather, it is a collection of episodes only held together by the presence of Maldoror, a maleficent man.

Les Mamelles de Tirésias by Guillaume Apollinaire Theatre (surrealist drama) 1917

This play is a play built on the surrealist model of exaggeration, fooling around with conventions and destroying standards. It is feminist in many ways. Guillaume Apollinaire himself is most well-known for his calligrammes, which are poems written in the shape of a drawing (examples here and here). Apollinaire is also said to be the one to have coined the term “surrealism”. Arthur Rimbaud was a strong inspiration for him.

Du monde entier au coeur du monde by Blaise Cendrars Poetry (free verse) 1957

This collection of poems is a posthumous collection of nearly all the poems written by Cendrars in his young days. His practice of free verse as well as his use of newspaper cutouts to form poems are part of what makes him a precursor and influence of surrealism.

The Surrealist movement:

Manifeste du surréalisme by André Breton Manifesto 1924

This text is a detailed explanation of all the ideological tenants of surrealism. Among them, the important value of the subconscious mind, dreams, automatism and automatic writing, and anticonformism should be noted, as they are principles embraced by all the authors associated with the movement. The main ideological belief of surrealism is that the subconscious mind is the ultimate source of aesthetic and artistic truth.

Le Théâtre et son double by Antonin Artaud Essays 1938

This series of short essays explains the tenants of Theatre of Cruelty as a theatrical form that seeks to break with the norm and solicit all the senses of the audience, to bring it in and engage it in an experience. His theory is heavily influenced by surrealism, although he broke from it earlier.

Exercices de style by Raymond Queneau Short story 1947

Raymond Queneau was a surrealist in his younger days, but broke from it and ended up forming his own literary association, with the help of François Le Lionnais, the OuLiPo (which stands for Ouvroir de la littérature potentielle, “Opener of potential literature”). The main objective of the OuLiPo is to encourage creativity through formal constraints, hence why Exercices de style, where the same, simple story is re-told 99 times in different ways. (Famous authors of the movement include Georges Perec, author of A Void (La Disparition) and Italo Calvino, amongst others.)

L’Écume des jours by Boris Vian Novel 1947

Boris Vian’s book draws heavily from surrealist influences in its poetic imagery, being full of incongruous metaphors and figures of speech, with an environment that resonates with the characters’ feelings in ways that go far beyond the usual. Sadly, it did not gain any recognition during the author’s lifetime, but it became one of the most important novels of the 20th century. (Note: I recommend strongly that you read at least some of Jean-Paul Sartre’s works before you read this one.)

H. Existentialism

La Nausée by Jean-Paul Sartre Novel 1938

A philosophical and somewhat autobiographical novel, La Nausée presents the main tenants of surrealism as they will be found in Sartre’s philosophical essays. It tells the tale of a man taken over by nausea because of the very task of existing. (This philosopher is also known for his close relationship with Simone de Beauvoir.)

La Peste by Albert Camus Novel 1947

La Peste, just like the author’s most well known book, L’Étranger, seeks to show the absurdity of existence in a city taken over by the plague. It is not without strongly resonating with the rise of Nazism that led the world to WWII.

Rhinocéros by Eugène Ionesco Theatre (Theatre of the Absurd) 1959

While Eugène Ionesco strongly denies any ties to existentialism or philosophy in his theatre, it’s easy to see the ideological ties between Camus and Sartre’s works, and Ionesco’s plays. Rhinocéros tells the story of a town taken over by an outbreak of a strange illness that turns everyone into rhinos. It can also be seen as a metaphor for the rise of totalitarianism and Nazism that led to WWII.

I. Nouveau Roman

La Jalousie by Alain Robbe-Grillet Novel 1957

La Jalousie seems on paper to be nothing but an ordinary love triangle, but what makes the Nouveau Roman is not the content of a book but its form. It is written in a non-linear, circular, redundant way, and told by an overly invasive and at the same time totally absent narrator that distorts and shapes the novel to his will.

Détruire, dit-elle by Marguerite Duras Novel (and movie) 1969

A novel around the strength of desire, Détruire, dit-elle has a minimal action set between four characters, and where destruction becomes the way of self-preservation. The book itself is written more as a collection of fragment than as a long, cohesive story. (Marguerite Duras directed herself a movie based on her book, which came out on the same year.)

Les Fruits d’Or by Nathalie Sarraute Novel 1963

This novel has no main character. It is a practice of the mise en abyme taken to the extreme, a figure where a fiction contains in itself another fiction, which has characteristics that mirror the first degree of fiction.

La Modification by Michel Butor Novel 1957

This book has a narrator that speaks with the second person plural, making the figure of its main character confound itself with the reader, and taking the reader on a trip from Paris to Rome and a train trip through the character’s consciousness. The trip itself has an influence on the novel’s structure.

Les Années by Annie Ernaux Novel 2008

Annie Ernaux’s novel is loosely tied to the Nouveau Roman by her choice of an autobiographic, stream of consciousness telling, but distant from it by the ideological content concerning the rise of consumerism in 20th century France (the Nouveau Roman writers typically distance themselves from any kind of social, political or philosophical commentary).

Note on surrealism, existentialism and Nouveau Roman: During the 20th centuries, very few authors actually followed a program during their whole life, and most of them were influenced on various levels by other movements. Some authors were only included for being influenced by a movement.

This is all for the second part! If you missed the first, you can find it here.

[oltnews]

The definition of Wikipedia audio drama is as follows:Radio drama (or audio drama, audio playback, radio playback, radio theater or audio theater) is a purely acoustic dramatized performance. With no visual component, radio fiction depends on dialogue, music and sound effects to help the listener imagine the characters and the story. " I started listening to radio dramas even before the audio books; in fact, radio dramas were the bridge I had to cross to start enjoying audio books, and I am extremely grateful that they taught me to be careful when listening seemed like a secondary task, something that I did something else. Admittedly, to this day, I still find it difficult to sit and listen, I generally play my audio books, podcasts or radio dramas while doing chores or crafts, but even if that does not seem to be a big problem, power Listen even keeping myself busy was a battle won, because my mind always tended to wander. The radio drama, with its different voices and sounds, projecting an atmosphere similar to that of a film, kept me focused long enough to teach me a certain auditory discipline. Although listening to radio drama may seem out of date, radio was the machine that transformed oral stories - often told within the same family - into a form of magical entertainment for an entire population. Before video, before television, radio dramas were the place where stories, beyond simple reading, took shape. In the 1940s until the 1950s, radio was the main popular entertainment. It was more than a source of information: music and novels were also an integral part of people's daily lives. In many ways, when people lived closed inside their own community, radio had to feel like the only direct thing connecting a whole family to those who lived far apart, in the country in which they lived and in the unknown world (rest of). This was true until at least the 1950s, and the only reason radio lost its appeal was because it was, in a sense, replaced by something that looked a little more like magic: the television. No matter how cool it was to listen to someone speak several miles away, nothing could beat the new enchantment created by the little magic box with tiny people trapped inside. Category ID: 1529 Audiobooks newsletter Register for Audio books to receive the latest news from the world of audio books. Thank you for signing up! Keep an eye on your inbox. By registering, you accept our terms of use But while television became very popular, radio was the first to launch a wide distribution of plays, most of them adapted to radio. Finally, because it was difficult to make this adaptation, since the plays largely depended on what the audience saw, many plays began to be written specifically for broadcasting. This meant that with the help of sound effects - usually created with the most common objects and a lot of imagination - listeners had the full experience of a room, made only for their ears. The first radio dramas The first play written specially for the radio was A comedy of danger, by Richard Hughes, broadcast in January 1924, commissioned by the BBC in Great Britain. In the United States, the first radio drama is believed to have been a program called The wolf, adapted from a play by Charles Sommerville by Eugène Walter, also in 1924. But radio drama has its roots in another type of broadcasting, long before radio technology was developed. Between 1900 and 1920, people used a network of lines to listen to shows - it was called the theatrophone. Basically the equivalent of placing a glass against your neighbor's walls to listen to them play the piano (or to spy on their own personal dramas). Of course, the theophone was better installed, had better sound quality and was less discreet (and rude). It did, however, allow people to listen to things that they would not have been able to listen to otherwise. Also, here is a little nugget of knowledge that proves, once again, that times and technologies are changing, but people are pretty much the same: as new plays began to be written for radio, and others adapted, many claimed that radio was ruining theater sales. And the boy, they were angry. They didn't know that the two plays AND the radio would still amuse us today. Most of the dramas of the golden age of radio were live broadcasts and were not recorded. In fact, until the late 1940s, national networks prohibited the broadcasting of recorded programs because of its inferior sound quality. It was only after World War II, with the development of high fidelity, that recording became more common. On the air… Panic! How Orson Welles Created a Radio Legend The story of War of the Worlds first appeared in two magazines in 1897: Pearson Magazine (in the UK), and Cosmopolitan (in the USA.). It became a real book from the publisher William Heinemann a year later, in 1898. The science fiction novel, written by HG Wells, is one of the first to imagine a struggle between humans and aliens invading Earth. In the evening of October 30, 1938, the radio adaptation was broadcast live as part of Mercury Theater on the air, narrated by Orson Welles. It could have been another adaptation, another radio show, but it is now etched in the history of radio drama forever. The original story takes place in England, but playwright Edward Koch decided to make the decor more attractive to American listeners and changed it to take place in New Jersey. Everyone involved in the production agreed that the first part of the adaptation would be made to resemble a news program, in order to appear more realistic. With the brilliant interpretation of Orson Welles and the excellent work of the production team, who managed to create what looked like a regular radio broadcast interrupted here and there with newsletters, they got exactly what that they had negotiated. And then some. Those at home who missed the opening announcement, which contained the only warning that it was a fictitious radio play, believed that the stories being told were really happening and took to the streets in panic. If they had stayed during the second half of the drama, which was broadcast in a more conventional style, they would have realized how stupid they had been. People got so angry at the repercussions of the play - and, I bet for being mistaken for fools, bless them - that the Federal Communications Commission had to make changes to the way broadcasters clarified the veracity - or fiction - of their radio dramas. Focus on drama. Later, when asked about the panic caused by the show, Welles was asked to say if he shouldn't have softened the drama, to which he replied: "No, you're not playing murder with sweet words." Congratulations to our man Welles. Of course, upon hearing this story, we would like to believe that we are wiser and more informed these days, but with all the false news that is spreading, we should all be ready to humbly descend from our great horses. It is metaphorically speaking. Many recordings released during the so-called golden age of radio are still available on the Internet Archive to this day. Some known classics, in addition War of the Worlds, are: The shadow Serial dramas of the 1930s, developed by Walter B. Gibson, some episodes also included Orson Welles. Lone ranger If Chuck Norris as Walker, Texas Ranger had a radio series, that would be it. He inspired a TV show and even a series of books. Its creator is unclear, being attributed either to George W. Temble (the owner of the radio station), or to Frank Striker (the writer). Archers The oldest radio soap in the world is BBC Radio 4 Archers, released for the first time in 1951, and still as solid. (A personal thought: I see a lot of male names linked to the creation of radio dramas, so when someone comes to tell you that women are starting the whole drama, please redirect them to this post.) Radio drama in present times Despite what many may have predicted when television began to take over the entertainment industry, radio drama seems to have made a steady comeback in the past decade, particularly thanks to the voices of independent creators. While our parents are still mostly used to listening to the radio, the younger generations are now listening to podcasts, which gives us the advantage of being able to actively choose what we listen to and what deserves our attention. Audio is no longer just a means of entertainment, but a new way to learn, follow the news and, often, advertise and develop a business. Although the British BBC is still the largest supplier of audio drama - at least per station, with BBC Radio 4 producing several drama and comedy shows and even hosting audio awards - radio dramas are no longer simply transmitted by radio stations usual: the teams creating and continuing them season after season with the help of their admirers, inviting them to support their work via Patreon or any other similar means. An example of this is Wooden overcoat, a radio soap opera featuring two funeral homes of competitors on a small (fictitious) island. The production - which is a comedy and deserves to be listened to - should record its fourth series this year, and although it is not broadcast by any public radio station, its fans have supported them massively (and economically) season after season since started in 2015. Welcome to Night Vale is another example in which an independent soap opera swept an audience, and it was reserved for 50 live broadcasts across the United States and Europe in 2020 alone. Because these are independent productions, they have more freedom to try different things and are more focused on what their fans expect from the series. The continuation or cancellation of these broadcasts is determined directly by their listeners, rather than on the agenda of a radio station. Of course, one of the reasons why audio entertainment has become so popular is due to the fact that it is now easier than ever to acquire the equipment necessary to start audio production. Even people on a very limited budget can create a podcast from scratch from their home and be successful. With just a laptop and a microphone, you're ready to bring great audio content to your home's merchandise. There are free programs like Audacity which allow you to record, erase and move audio tracks to create a flawless recording capable of engaging thousands of people. The possibilities extend to creativity. With the tools we have now - phones with great cameras and good technology are getting cheaper and more widely available - such productions could very easily be done in video form, but there are many advantages to choosing to produce - and - consume audio instead of video: audio is easier to record and edit than video, and it requires less storage space. It is also much cheaper to create an entire production based solely on sound effects than to create anything to tell the same story on video: the accessories, the decor and the costumes represent a lot of work and, above all, a big spent. For consumers, audio does not require as much attention and does not require as much of our time: with audio, we do not need to sit and watch. The soap opera allows us to be productive while we consume it, and it can even be used as a supplement for chores, and vice versa. My household chores, commuting, and exercising have become much more interesting since I discovered radio theater and audio books, as this now means that I can also read / learn. I take as much time to do chores as I do to finish listening to my favorite book, TED Talk or radio comedy. I am productive in two ways, and whatever the task at hand, I lighten up because I have something to have fun while I do it. The audio allows me to continue. On top of that, it doesn't really need a sophisticated device so as not to compromise on quality: I am still using a used 5th generation iPod touch, from 2012, and it works very well, but I could very easily listen to anything on my phone. We cannot be certain for sure how audio drama and audio entertainment in general will evolve over the next decade, but studies indicate an increase in the consumption of audio books, so we expect as the audio drama numbers and productions, will continue to increase in the same way. via GIPHY Listen to these radio dramas If you're looking to fill your life with new radio shows, here are some favorites! The White Vault "The White Vault presents international distribution and brilliant sound design. If you like the way sound can add spookiness and vibe to your horror, you're going to love what this audio drama makes of it. " —Vernieda Vergaras The Bright Sessions "The Bright Sessions was one of my first experiences with audio drama and the reason why I am such an avid listener of fiction podcasts now. The characters and their stories were so important to me in my own journey with identity, mental health, etc. over the years, and it remains my favorite forever. " —Patricia Thang Neverwhere and Good omens Both are productions of BBC Radio 4 and both are brilliantly produced. With a fantastic cast, Gaiman’s (and Pratchett, in the case of Good omens) wonderful stories really come to life in this production. Gaiman has seen other of his radio adapted books, but these are still my personal favorites. Cabin pressure First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2008, the series caught the attention of the whole world with the boom created by Benedict Cumberbatch and his BBC Sherlock. Benedict is part of the cast alongside Roger Allam, Stephanie Cole and John Finnemore, who is also the author of the series. The series is still my favorite to this day; it's amazing to see the evolution of each character through the four seasons, and it (always) scares me every time I listen to it again. Which I have done countless times. Wolf 359 Similar to the traditional dramas of the golden age of radio mentioned in the article, this podcast is a science fiction tale set on board the U.S.S. Hephaestus space station. The show draws as much on the development of their character as on their decor to create a story full of suspense. Adventures in New America Another science fiction drama, this time in the genre of Afrofuturism. His two main characters - "fat, lonely AI curmudgeon and lesbian thief Simon Carr", as described on the official website - are jostling New York to try to make ends meet. They end up facing a few unexpected enemies on the way to reach their goals. The face of the moon With a story that will come out at the center of its plot, it will strike particularly close to home for the children of emigrants who find it difficult to understand where they belong among the different cultures with which they grew up. The main character, Paul, wants to tell his mother about his sexuality, but she does not speak English and he does not speak Korean. It is a story of identity, in its different forms. Super ordinary Anika is a young woman with superpowers. The only problem is that her superpowers only show up when she has a panic attack. If she thought it was difficult to try to control her mind, the fact that she could no longer control her mind or her superpowers made it even more difficult to manage. With the help of her best friend, Anika tries to be heard and to tell her story. If you liked this article and want to know more about the audio drama, here are some links that you will find useful! Fiction podcasts to satisfy your love for stories More fiction podcasts to satisfy your love for stories Fiction podcasts for superhero fans https://oltnews.com/radio-drama-yesterday-and-today-book-riot?_unique_id=5ea173e9b1f1b