My Fair Lady

Here's some clips from My Fair Lady, the movie that was based on Pygmalion.

This is one of the most iconic scenes:


And here you can see some of the hardwork that came before:

Definitely watch the whole movie if you haven't seen it!

Hope you've bought your books already!
(And I hope you're enjoying the good weather. Maybe the rain will stay mainly in the plains...or where ever it is.)

Reading for March: Pygmalion

Hello Everyone! I just wanted to thank everyone that came last night, and to post some information. As both groups decided, the reading for March will be the play Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw. It is in five acts, and is available here, to read online. It's available in a variety of formats, if you just want text, the HTML format is the easiest. If you happen to have some sort of e-reader, there are formats for that as well. The book is also available in English off the amazon.es website (here), where the book is very affordable if you do not want to read on the computer. But I suggest you order it soon, because our next meeting is March 29th the last Thursday of March. See you then! (And check back to the blog soon for information about the different graphic novels we might read in April.)

Short Video of "The Lottery"

Here's a short film based on the short story. Is it how you imagined the story?

Podcast for "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson

Here is the link to a podcast done by the New Yorker Fiction Podcast. A.M. Homes, a contemporary American author, reads the short story aloud and then discusses the story with the editor of the podcast, Deborah Treisman. So if you want to listen to the story!

The Lottery

Our reading for February will be "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson.

"The Lottery” is a classic in modern literature. It was published in the June 26, 1948, issue of The New Yorker and it became the most controversial short story in its history. Soon after the piece was published, angry letters poured in to The New Yorker. Many readers canceled their subscriptions and sent hate mail throughout the summer. And while many of them claimed they didn’t understand the story, the intense reaction indicated they understood it all too well.

“The Lottery” is considered to be the paradigm of a perfectly crafted narrative. While the tale begins on a sunny, summer day, it builds at a ferocious pace, from daydream to nightmare. The writing is tight and compelling, and the story is impossible to forget. As author Jonathon Lethem puts it, “It now resides in the popular imagination as an archetype.”

 Authors including Stephen King, Nigel Kneale, Richard Matheson, and Neil Gaiman all credit Shirley Jackson as a source of inspiration, and for decades, “The Lottery” has been taught in middle schools and high schools across America. As author A.M. Holmes pointed out, the story is introduced to students when they are “just waking up to the oddity of things, and the terror that is in everyday life.”

It is said that “The Lottery” did more in nine pages than most novels do in nine chapters. Here’s how Shirley Jackson outraged a nation with fewer than 3,500 words:

The Lottery

(Taken from the Wikipedia and Book and Literature.)

Human Is?

Philip K. Dick’s Human Is? was the other short story we talked about. Philip K. Dick wrote the famous novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (later filmed as Blade Runner). He creates dark and depressing atmospheres and complex and engaging characters, some of them with a brittle sense of humor. In my view  Human Is? is not the best  story in A Window on the Universe but is the one that clearly examines what being human actually means.

BLADE RUNNER . Tears in the rain.

It’s a Good Life

On the 19th of January we held our monthly meeting at the CFR ,as we usually do. The book we were reading was called A Window on the Universe.
Of all the stories included in A Window on the Universe It’s a Good Life by Jerome Bixby may be the scariest. If you liked the story you´ll be interested in the web comic:

The Weird Web Comic: Episode #7 – Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life”