Check out the Library of Congress's new audio archive online

Recordings of major authors reading and talking about their work can now be streamed, bringing them back to vivid life

What joy. The Library of Congress has digitised some of its recordings and put them up online – I spent much of this morning listening to Ray Bradbury in 1982, talking about what happens “when the doom doesn’t arrive” in a lecture called Beyond 1984.

There’s also Kurt Vonnegut, reading from Breakfast of Champions, and an interview with an elderly Robert Frost, from 1959, which seems to start in the middle with a discussion of the interviewer’s name (Frost goes off on one, a bit) but continues with the poet reading and chatting for more than an hour (I wouldn’t say his interviewer has the easiest task). Adrienne Rich also appears, as do Anne Sexton and Czeslaw Milosz.

I learned my first lessons when I was nine, 10, 11 years old. First of all I learned the world wasn’t going to end immediately. My brother and I looked in the newspaper one day, I believe it was around May 1932, and the headline read, ‘WORLD IS COMING TO AN END MAY 24th’. Seventh Day Adventists predicted this, and guaranteed it. So my brother and I could hardly wait. We got out of bed and fixed a picnic lunch, devilled ham sandwiches, coca-cola, orange crush, and we went out on a hill outside of Waukegan and we waited for the world to end.

We debated how it was going to end - a comet was going to strike the earth, a flood was going to go over Waukegan and God knows it needed cleaning anyway, and an earthquake or a fire or some horrible thing was going to happen. Well, by noon we’d eaten most of the sandwiches, and by four o’clock drunk most of the orange crush, and by five the coca-cola, and at six o’clock that night we went home very disgruntled with the Seventh Day Adventists and a little put out with God. He hadn’t brought it off.

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