Up for free grabs is F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous short story, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Since its first publishing on May 27, 1922, this literary piece have been repeatedly anthologized in the author's book entitled Tales of the Jazz Age. Because of its popularity, it had been adopted into film by director David Fincher in 2008. The film stars Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett.

Highly regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th Century, Fitzgerald wrote widely-known novels such as The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender is the Night and a lot of short stories playing on the themes of youth, despair and age.

This particular short story tells about the life of Benjamin Button, a man born with the physical appearance of a 70-year old. At the age of 12, he discovers that he is aging backwards. This leads to bizarre consequences when it comes to fitting in to society, coping up with relationships and family affairs.

I love how the piece quickly grows and matures into a one-of-a-kind meditation of mortality, youth and death. Fitzgerald ends the story with such finesse, fleeting away like time itself fades into thin air.

Simply put, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is brilliantly unique. It's a canonical piece that places itself at the top of anyone's reading list.

Related Links:
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button on Feedbooks
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button on iTunes
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button on Wikisource
Tales of the Jazz Age on Project Gutenberg

Born January 19, 1809, Poe has played a considerable part in the American Romantic Movement. An author, poet, editor and literary critic, he was best known for his stories of macabre and mystery.

Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works was made possible with the help of John H. Ingram when he decided to present to society, for the first time, all the printed and unprinted poems of the brilliant author. This produced a showcase of Poe's poetical prowess, proving his stand in the world of literature.

Grouped into five chapters of Poe's life, the book is composed of sixty well-honed poems and three additional essays.

The book opens up with Poems of Later Life, a part where you'll find Poe's most beloved works such as The Raven, Annabel Lee and The City in the Sea.

It's then followed by Poems of Manhood featuring Lenore where the writer continues with his theme of dying women. But unlike most of his poems, Poe implies the possibility of meeting in paradise.

I personally liked the chapter made specifically for prose poems where he proves that he is more than just a dark and mysterious writer but he is indeed a true visionary.

Though he had a difficult life and career, Poe had proven his skill throughout history. So sit back, grab a cup of coffee and enjoy these magnificent obras.

Related Links:
Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works on Google Books
Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works on Project Gutenburg
Edgar Allan Poe on the Literature Network

In 1741 the Norwegian-Danish author Ludvig Holberg published Klimii Iter Subterraneum, a satirical science-fiction/fantasy novel detailing the adventures of its hero Niels Klim in a utopian society existing beneath the surface of the earth. Peter Fitting, author of Subterranean Worlds: A Critical Anthology, explores Holberg’s book in the wider context of the hollow earth theory.

In 1818 John Cleves Symmes, Jr, issued his “Circular Number 1,” sending copies to “each notable foreign government, reigning prince, legislature, city, college, and philosophical society, quite around the earth”:

I declare that the earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees. I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and aid me in the undertaking.

The fortunes of the idea that the Earth was “hollow and habitable within,” from classical references to the underworld to esoteric and New Age writers today, have been recounted elsewhere, most notably by Walter Kafton-Minkel in his Subterranean Worlds: 100,000 years of dragons, dwarfs, the dead, lost races & UFOs from inside the earth (1989). Symmes’s theories led to a number of fictional visions of the “world within”, most immediately, Adam Seaborn’s 1820 novel Symzonia – a work which has often been attributed to Symmes himself; and the novel with its diagrams and drawings was for some time cited as evidence that the world is hollow. In a somewhat different way, Symmes’s conviction that there were openings at the poles also led to the establishment of perhaps the most famous American naval scientific expedition, the “United States Exploring Expedition” which was commissioned to explore the South Pacific and led to the establishment of a national museum of natural history – the Smithsonian Institute. (The history of the expedition and its origins in Symmes’ ideas is recounted in William Stanton’s 1975 The Great United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842).

Sectional View of the earth Showing the Opening at the Poles, a diagram from Symzonia by Capt. Adam Seaborn (probably a pseudonym used by Capt. John Cleves Symmes)

Symmes, however, was not the first to argue that the Earth was hollow; nor is Symzonia the first novel set in a hollow earth. There are of course numerous narratives – dating back to Greek and Roman texts – of descents into the underworld, but hypotheses about vast channels or chasms inside the Earth appear to be a much more recent idea advanced by some European thinkers in the 17th and 18th centuries as an explanation of volcanoes, whirlpools and the like. This period is filled with a variety of now discarded cosmological hypotheses, many inspired by the attempt to reconcile scriptural accounts of Creation with scientific observation: hypotheses about the movement of the sun, the earth and the stars, about the universality of the great Flood, about creation and the origins of life, and about the earth’s own formation. Among the proponents of now abandoned theories about the composition of our planet was Edmond Halley (better known for the comet which bears his name), who proposed (in a paper explaining the movement of the magnetic poles published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1692) that the earth was hollow: “that the seemingly solid earth is actually a shell about 500 miles thick containing three smaller concentric spheres… each sphere separated from the others by about 500 miles of atmosphere.”

Diagram from Edmond Halley's paper explaining the movement of the magnetic poles which was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1692

While it is perhaps relatively easy to follow the theories of inner cavities or of a passage between the poles (in writers like Thomas Burnet and Athanasius Kircher in the late 17th century), and to see their relationship to a text like the anonymous 1721 Relation D’Un Voyage Du Pole Arctique Au Pole Antarctique Par Le Centre Du Monde, (which describes a channel running through the Earth from pole to pole), it is much more difficult to understand how the idea of the hollow Earth emerged as part of Halley’s explanation of the motion of the magnetic poles. Even more inexplicable is the depiction of the hollow earth some fifty years earlier – complete with inner sun and earth – in Ludvig Holberg’s 1741 subterranean utopia, The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground. This is a far greater imaginative leap, for instance, than Jules Verne’s well-known account of a descent into the bowels of the earth through a dormant volcano (Voyage au centre de la terre, 1865). Verne’s narrative of the discovery of a vast underworld cavern formed during an earlier geological period seems much more plausible than Holberg’s invention of two entire inner worlds – one a planet inhabited by intelligent trees, the other the underside of the earth’s crust, as vast as the outer crust on which we live, and populated with a fantastic variety of intelligent life forms.

First published in Latin in 1741, The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground, with a new theory of the Earth and the History of the previously unknown Fifth Kingdom (Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum, Novam Telluris theoriem ac Historiam Quintae Monarchiae adhuc nobis incognita exhibens) was quickly translated into a number of European languages. (The first English edition dates from 1742). As with Verne’s Voyage, the adventure begins with the descent into a cave, although here the hero falls through a hole into the subterranean world, discovering: “that the conjectures of those men are right who hold the Earth to be hollow, and that within the shell or outward crust there is another lesser globe, and another firmament adorned with lesser sun, stars, and planets”.

Illustration showing Niels Klim with the tree-people of Potu, from the 1845 English edition of Niels Klim’s Journey Under the Ground

On the central planet, Klim discovers a happy and prosperous utopian land of intelligent, mobile trees. In his subsequent travels around the planet Klim encounters many bizarre varieties of intelligent trees, and each species forms a separate social grouping. It is these sections of the novel that have earned Klim a place in the history of utopia. But in the final sections of the work Holberg turns from utopia and social satire to fantasy: Klim is expelled from the utopian land of Potu to the underside of the earth’s crust which is inhabited by many other fantastic creatures, all of which – plant and animal species alike – are intelligent and gifted with speech; and then he discovers a race of human savages, who, of all the creatures of the subterranean world, “alone were barbarous and uncivilized”. Klim takes it upon himself to civilise them, and uses his knowledge to manufacture gunpowder and to conquer all of the countries of the firmament, becoming a tyrant – the “Alexander of the Subterranean world”. When his subjects eventually rebel, he is forced into flight and falls into the same hole through which he had previously fallen, thus returning to Norway.

The Journey of Niels Klim was widely known in the 19th century: the narrator of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” includes the “Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm” among his readings, while the poet Thomas de Quincy began a translation of Klim sometime in the mid-1820s. Giacomo Casanova (better known for his Memoirs) wrote a lengthy subterranean utopia — L’Icosameron (1788) — in which he acknowledges the importance of Holberg’s novel; while Mary Shelly mentions in her diary that she read Klim as she was writing Frankenstein. Fictional settings inside the earth can be found throughout the 19th and 20th centuries – from Edgar Allen Poe’s “Ms. found in a Bottle” (1833) and his unfinished “Narrative of A. Gordon Pym” (1837), through to Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellucidar novels, beginning with At the Earth’s Core (1922); and more recently there are authors like Raymond Bernard and William Read who continue to argue that the Earth is hollow.

Illustration showing the tree-people of Potu pronouncing judgement on their dead king, as is their custom, from the 1845 English edition of Niels Klim’s Journey Under the Ground

Born in Bergen, Norway at the time of the Dano-Norwegian monarchy, Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754) is probably the most European of Scandinavian writers before Ibsen and certainly the best known; he is often referred to as the “father” of Danish and Norwegian literature. He was a writer, essayist, philosopher, historian and playwright who travelled extensively throughout Europe and is often credited as bringing the Enlightenment to the Nordic countries. In fact, the author of The Journey of Niels Klim was far better known for his “Introduction to Natural and International Law“ and his theatre (he has been described as the “Moliere of the North”). Like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Klim is a combination of social satire, utopia and the fantastic. But Swift’s shipwrecked narrator is a much more familiar (and plausible) utopian narrative device than is Holberg’s imagination of a hollow earth. Holberg never explains who “those men … who hold the Earth to be hollow” are, and none of his critics have been able to identify them. As long as Holberg’s sources continue to be a mystery, The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground must be considered the first presentation of the idea of the hollow earth.

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Peter Fitting is professor emeritus of French and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. His work has focused primarily on utopian fiction and on 20th century science fiction. In 2004 he published: Subterranean Worlds: A Critical Anthology, (Wesleyan UP). For more information on these topics and samples of his work see: The Society for Utopian Studies and Science Fiction Studies.

LINKS TO WORKS

Niels Klim’s journey under the ground; being a narrative of his wonderful descent to the subterranean lands; together with an account of the sensible animals and trees inhabiting the planet Nazar and the firmament (1845 edition) by Ludwig Holberg
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An Account of the Cause of the Change of the Variation of the Magnetical Needle; With an Hypothesis of the Structure of the Internal Parts of the Earth: As It Was Proposed to the Royal Society in One of Their Late Meetings (1753) by Edmond Halley.
pdf online
pdf download
kindle

Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition. During the years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842 (1845) by Charles Wilkes.
pdf online
pdf download
kindle
text

Symmes’s theory of concentric spheres : demonstrating that the earth is hollow, habitable within, and widely open about the poles (1826) by James McBride.
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text

Stories Of A Hollow Earth was originally published by Peter Fitting in The Public Domain Review under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. If you wish to reuse it please see: http://publicdomainreview.org/legal/

The reviewed work is free of known copyright restrictions.

Cuentos de Recuperación es un compendio de historias cortas basadas en hechos reales las cuales nos dejan lecciones de vida que nos llenan de inspiración para vivir nuestras vidas a plenitud, a vivir amando.

Escritas y narradas por su autora Sonia Echezuría, esta es la primera promoción de contenido en español para la comunidad de usuarios hispanos de FrostWire en todo el mundo.

Contenido del Torrent
El archivo .torrent descargará una selección de tres cuentos licenciados bajo Creative Commons. Los encontrarás en archivos de audio mp3 de alta calidad narrados por la autora del libro, Sonia Echezuría.

Cada track tiene musica de fondo creada por Kevin MacLeod. Tambien vas a encontrar una versión en PDF y otra versión para que la puedas leer en tu Amazon Kindle, la cual fue ilustrada por Ricardo Gómez

Que són los Cuentos de Recuperación?
Si me preguntan de que se tratan estos cuentos, creo que lo mejor es compartir una anécdota sobre uno de los cuentos incluidos en esta edición Creative Commons "Ella La Nenita".

Cuando escuché por primera vez el cuento, me pareció tan poderosa la historia y la forma en que fue contada, que llamé a mi esposa a la habitación. Mi esposa no habla español, así que tuve que traducirle en vivo a medida que escuchábamos el cuento. A unos dos tercios de la historia, a medida que voy traduciendo, se me van erizando los pelos al ver como se le salían las lagrimas a mi mujer que de algún modo se sintió identificada con esta historia de madre e hija (ahora que ella es madre).

En mi vida, había visto a una persona llorar leyendo un libro, menos aun yo contandole una historia.

Creo que Cuentos de Recuperación, en sus varios formatos narrados y escritos, disponibles para ti en cualquier dispositivo de soporte a mp3, pdf o libro electrónico te dejará viendo el mundo de forma diferente al encontrarte con estas historias de personas que han tocado fondo para recuperarse de una manera u otra, o al menos aprender grandes lecciones y recuperarse.

Esta edición solo contiene 3 cuentos, un intro y un adios. Estos cuentos están licenciados bajo Creative Commons, lo que quiere decir que eres libre de compartirlos bajo la misma licencia (No puedes alterarlos, ni venderlos, solo compartirlos y dar atributo a sus creadores). Si deseas escuchar el resto de los cuentos puedes adquirirlos en tu tienda digital favorita.

Consigue el audio libro completo
En BandCamp
En Amazon
En iTunes

Consigue el libro electronico completo
Cuentos de Recuperación para Kindle

Sobre la Autora
Tengo la suerte de conocer a Sonia en persona. Su historia de recuperación es asombrosa, pero lo dejo a tu curiosidad averiguarla. Solo te puedo decir que tanto ella como su familia son lo que yo llamaría “Cuenta Cuentos” natos. Pasé gran parte de mi niñez y adolescencia visitando su casa y Sonia siempre ha sido para mi no solo como una hermana mayor, sino una fuente de inspiración enorme, una persona a la cual pedir consejos, y una persona que de cierto modo he tenido como rol en mi vida. Sonia es una profesional de medios de telecomunicación quien se desempeño hace unos años atrás como creativa en HBO y quien fue galardonada internacionalmente por sus logros profesionales. Después de haber logrado sus sueños profesionales se dió cuenta de ese don natural de confortar y aconsejar a otros y se convirtió igualmente en una exitosa Life Coach y Reverenda Multi-Fe en los Estados Unidos.

Contacta directamente @revSonia en Twitter si le quieres decir algo.

Los Cuentos de Recuperación para mi, son un mashup de muchas de las cosas que Sonia es, Creatividad, Cuenta Cuentos, Comunicación, Buenos Consejos, todo puesto en un libro cuya costura es mucho amor.

Creditos
Director de Arte: Juan Pablo Marín Correa
Ilustrador: Ricardo Gómez

Enlaces Relacionados:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

The Power of Open is close to 50 page report on the success and impact of Creative Commons Licensing over the past decade through the experiences of artist, educators, scientists and institutions.

We have featured and reviewed many Creative Commons artists here on FrostClick and unconditionally support the licensing format as a tool that enables free sharing of information & resources to realize "the full potential of the internet".

Creative Commons began providing licenses for the open sharing of content only a decade ago. Now more than 400 million CC-licensed works are available on the Internet, from music and photos, to research findings and entire college courses. Creative Commons created the legal and technical infrastructure that allows effective sharing of knowledge, art and data by individuals, organizations and governments. More importantly, millions of creators took advantage of that infrastructure to share work that enriches the global commons for all humanity.

From The Power of Open

Some amazing quotes from the report:

June Cohen - TEDTalks
“This phenomenal growth is entirely driven by free and open distribution, CC licensing has enabled sharing in ways well beyond what we could have done on our own.”

Jonathan Worth - Photographer
“We don’t have all the answers, but CC lets me choose my flavor and helps me take advantage of the things working against me.”

Nina Paley - Artist
“I’ve never had more money coming at me than when I started using Creative Commons BY-SA. I have a higher profile. I don’t spend anything on promotion. My fans are doing it for me and buying merchandise. Sharing put me on the map.”

DJ Vadim - Musician
“Music is a conversation, between creators and listeners, each bringing their own experiences to the melting pot.”

Solana Larsen - Global Voices
“Creative Commons gives us the liberty to facilitate translations into more than a dozen languages daily.”

Frances Pinter - Bloomsbury Academic
“Publishers are worried that making content available for free will cannibalize print sales, but we believe that for certain types of books, free promotes the print.”

Dan Zaccagnino - Indaba Music
“There was a lot of push-back in the beginning, but we’ve proven to musicians and record labels that there’s so much benefit to licensing with CC.”

Curt Smith - Artist
“CC is a smart way to go for any artist. Why would anyone want to go around suing their fans?”

Melinda Lee - Uncensored Interview
“We want to take a look at what people are doing and allow for that in our production strategy.”

Sylvain Zimmer - Jamendo
“We want musicians to see Creative Commons licenses, Jamendo, and the idea of free music as a real and beneficial alternative for music distribution.”

Salman Khan - Khan Academy
“If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, I could still continue to teach a million people a year.”

The Report is available in print version as well and has been translated to other languages.

Related Links:
The Power of Open Official Website
The Power of Open on CC blog

Except where otherwise noted, content in The Power of Open is licensed under aCreative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Contact us about The Power of Open at info@thepowerofopen.org.

So what does it take to thrive in the ever-changing music industry? Could New Music Strategies provide some of the answers? Well, actually it just could.
The content of the e-book might have been written in 2007 (light-years in the age of Internet) but its underlying principles are more than valid today and remain one of the top resources out there ready to help you (yes you!), aspiring musician, navigate through and understand the ever-changing nature of the industry. In essence, New Music Strategies by Andrew Dubber, is there to remind you of some basic yet extremely important guidelines (about 20 of them) and set you off on a great start in the new media environment.

The author of the e-book, Andrew Dubber, is a senior lecturer and researcher at UCE Birmingham. With a background in radio and music industry in general, Dubber has written many articles, book chapters, and conference presentations on the topic. More recently he has also co-authored a UNESCO commissioned book on new technologies for broadcasters in the developing countries.

New Music Strategies started off as a series of blog posts (extending from March to May of 2007). As the blog series came to an end and the audience kept on growing, Dubber decided to compile all the written content into a 96-page PDF file - something that would be much more easily accessible for his readers. Soon the project grew even larger, and now contains versions of the e-book in Portuguese, Chinese, Spanish, and German, with audiobook version read by Anthony Richardson and produced by Media Music Now. Of course there is also a print copy of the book and an easy access to the original published blog entries. (The e-book is yours to keep, distribute, turn into a newsletter, or share through your own website - all for free.)

New Music Strategies is also a website belonging to a group of talented professionals ready to help small and medium music businesses and artists in utilizing new online technologies in order to thrive in this ever changing business. The website comes with a great resource for all of you who want to keep up with the latest developments in the music industry through its Newswire service, so be sure to check it out.

A little bit about the team:

Based in UK, the Netherlands, and Germany - Andrew Dubber has teamed up with Andrea Goetzke, Steve Lawson, Saskia Troccoli and Ian Wallman who together make up, what they call, a pan-European group for music culture, creativity and development. Combining their wide ranging expertise the group sets of into the world initiating great new ideas and projects while partnering with organizations to "make the most of music in response to transformative media technologies".

Related Links:
New Music Strategies Official Website
New Music Strategies on Twitter
New Music Strategies on Facebook

According to Sean Luke metaheuristics is a "common but unfortunate name for any stochastic optimization algorithm intended to be the last resort before giving up and using random or brute-force search. Such algorithms are used for problems where you don't know how to find a good solution, but if shown a candidate solution, you can give it a grade. " .