<p>Tonight I’ll read “The Widower,” my own unfinished novel about the American poet Hart Crane. It is narrated by an imagined character who purports to have been Hart Crane’s lover in the months just before Crane’s death in 1932. So I invite you now to lie down and close your eyes, calm yourself down, relax completely, and let yourself by taken off to sleep: literate sleep. </p>

Tonight I’ll read “The Widower,” my own unfinished novel about the American poet Hart Crane. It is narrated by an imagined character who purports to have been Hart Crane’s lover in the months just before Crane’s death in 1932. So I invite you now to lie down and close your eyes, calm yourself down, relax completely, and let yourself by taken off to sleep: literate sleep.

<p>Tonight I’ll read “The Widower,” my own unfinished novel about the American poet Hart Crane. It is narrated by an imagined character who purports to have been Hart Crane’s lover in the months just before Crane’s death in 1932. So I invite you now to lie down and close your eyes, calm yourself down, relax completely, and let yourself by taken off to sleep: literate sleep.&nbsp;</p>

The Widower: an unfinished novel about Hart Crane

Rick Whitaker, author and host of the nocturnal podcast Literate Sleep, reads aloud from literary texts that you can enjoy while falling asleep. These are not cliffhangers or thrillers. They’re citizens of the low country, content to amble along to see whatever happens to be there--fabulous but fully self-evident literary landscapes without the promise of climax, epiphany, or resolution. These texts could go on, it seems, forever, which is not to say that they’re boring. They're not. Among the writers whose work will be featured in future episodes are, for instance, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Lynch, W. G. Sebald, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Richard Howard, Ronald Firbank, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Marcel Proust, Toni Morrison, William James, Edith Hamilton, and the list could go on and on--you could be put to sleep by the list itself. But as a reader with a severe allergy to boredom, Rick Whitaker will always strive to put you to sleep with texts that will not bore you. In his quiet readings without music, these literary texts will lull you, pacify you, and induce you to sweet, smart dreams. The first episode is a reading of a 1913 story by the Swiss writer Robert Walser. Born in 1878, Walser was a dropout from school at 14. In his 50s he retired to a sanatorium where, he said, he went “not to write, but to be mad.” "Kleist in Thun" is his homage to the German poet Heinrich von Kleist. Following the Walser story, a page from James Joyce's famously inscrutable novel Finnegans Wake. But you’ll be sound asleep by then. Literate sleep.

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The Widower: an unfinished novel about Hart Crane

The Widower: an unfinished novel about Hart Crane