Shameless promotion of a friend's project...

[DanaC]

Ok. First off apols for the slightly spammy nature of this.

An online friend has started an audio project/company which I think is brilliant and worthy of success. Since he's doing it on a shoe string and has no advertising budget to speak of, he's pretty much exclusively relying on word of mouth to get it off the ground (facebook, twitter etc). So I feel it would be remiss of me not to mention it here; especially given the fact that there are a fair few dwellars here who appreciate poetry and classic literature.

The friend in question is a freelance director/actor/writer/artist who does a lot of work for the audio company Big Finish (who I've mentioned here before, and who do the Doctor Who audio plays), which is how I got to know him (via the BF forum community).

The project is called Textbook Stuff, and is a series of audio productions/readings of classic texts tied to, but not exclusively so, the schools and colleges curricula. The intention is to do a range of genres, so there will be horror stories (such as Edgar Allen Poe) and poetry, and other classic texts. They're audio readings, but with soundtracks and sound effects and utilising known audio talent (such as John Sessions) several of whom have already come on board.

They're only available online as downloads, but they're available as complete audio books, or individual tracks (so you can get a particular poem rather than the entire collection if you want) at Itunes and Lulu.

The first production was released about a week ago and is a selection of poems by a WW1 poet called Edward Thomas, and also includes as bonus material extracts of his war diary. It's read by Barnaby Edwards (the friend in question) and I think he's done a blinding job of it...then again his voice does tend to make me go a bit girly :P I've been listening to the poems on and off for the past few days and it's been a brilliant introduction to a poet I hadn't read before. There's one poem in particular - In Memoriam (Easter 1915) - which I just adore: it's very short and deceptively simple, but moving.

At the moment he's concentrating on out of copyright classics (for obvious reasons lol) and at his homepage he's included a forum for suggestions: so if anyone has a really excellent idea of a classic poem or story that they think would be good to hear in audio and/or useful for students of literature please feel free to post them.

More info can be found here: http://www.textbookstuff.com/

Again, apols for pushing a product here, but I think this project deserves more attention and am really hoping it gets a good response.