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Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Free Book (Kindle/nook/iBooks/EPUB) - Shedding Skin

Update: 11/2/11 Now also free from iTunes and Sony.
Update: 10/31/11 Now free from Barnes & Noble.

Shedding Skin, by Robert Ward, is free in the Kindle store.
Book Description
A tour of the 1950s and 1960s recounts the author's coming-of-age experiences in a period torn between idealism and despair, chronicling his journey between Baltimore and Haight-Ashbury and his witness to the historical events of the time.

This classic novel, the 1972 winner of a National Endowment for the Arts Award, turns, providing an essential companion piece to The King of Cards. Illuminated by the author’s personal experiences, this authentic coming-of-age novel presents a cavalcade of memorable characters and adventures.
Get the free ebook from Barnes & Noble.
Get the free ebook from iTunes.
Get the free ebook from Sony.

Friday, September 30, 2011

Today's Deals and Bargain Books

It's the last day of the month, so expect the $3.99 or less books at Amazon to go back up in price tomorrow, as will this month's list of $5 (or less) MP3 albums. For those in the UK, be sure to browse the Kindle Bargains page, as there are some Crime, Thrillers & Mystery selections for £0.99, which will no doubt go back up, as well. Today's post is a bit longer than usual, as I'm including more bargains that I expect to go up soon.

Breakfast of Champions ($0.99), by Kurt Vonnegut, is today's Kindle Deal of the Day. If you waited to get a replacement for your worn out paper copy during the $3.99 sale, grab this one quick.
Book Description
BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS (1973) provides frantic, scattershot satire and a collage of Vonnegut's obsessions. His recurring cast of characters and American landscape was perhaps the most controversial of his canon; it was felt by many at the time to be a disappointing successor to SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, which had made Vonnegut's literary reputation. The core of the novel is Kilgore Trout, a familiar character very deliberately modeled on the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985), a fact which Vonnegut conceded frequently in interviews and which was based upon his own occasional relationship with Sturgeon. Here Kilgore Trout is an itinerant wandering from one science fiction convention to another; he intersects with the protagonist, Dwayne Hoover (one of Vonnegut's typically boosterish, lost and stupid mid-American characters) and their intersection is the excuse for the evocation of many others, familiar and unfamiliar, dredged from Vonnegut's gallery. The central issue is concerned with intersecting and apposite views of reality, and much of the narrative is filtered through Trout who is neither certifiably insane nor a visionary writer but can pass for either depending upon Dwayne Hoover's (and Vonnegut's) view of the situation. America, when this novel was published, was in the throes of Nixon, Watergate and the unraveling of our intervention in Vietnam; the nation was beginning to fragment ideologically and geographically and Vonnegut sought to cram all of this dysfunction (and a goofy, desperate kind of hope, the irrational comfort given to its fans by the genre of science fiction) into a sprawling narrative whose sense, if any, is situational, not conceptual. Reviews were polarized; the novel was celebrated for its bizarre aspects, became the basis of a Bruce Willis movie adaptation whose reviews were not nearly so polarized. (Most critics hated it.) This novel in its freewheeling and deliberately fragmented sequentiality may be the quintessential Vonnegut novel, not necessarily his best, but the work which most truly embodies the range of his talent, cartooned alienation and despair.

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) is perhaps the most beloved American writer of the 20th century. His audience has built steadily since his first pieces in the 1950's. Vonnegut’s 1968 novel, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE has become a canonic war novel - with Joseph Heller's CATCH-22 the truest and darkest of all to have come from World War II. Vonnegut began as a science fiction writer and his early novels PLAYER PIANO and THE SIRENS OF TITAN were so categorized even as they appealed to a young audience far beyond science fiction readers. In the 1960's he became the writer most identified with the Baby Boomer generation. Like the novels of Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut’s large body of work is now understood as unified. There is a consistency to his satirical insight, humor and anger which makes his work synergistic. The more of Kurt Vonnegut’s work you read, the more the work resonates and the more you wish to read. Vonnegut’s reputation - like Twain’s - will grow steadily through the decades to come as his work grows in relevance, truthfulness and searing insight.

Moving Day ($4.49 Kindle; $1.80 B&N), the first title in Meg Cabot's Allie Finkle's Rules for Girls series for teens, is the Nook Daily Find today.
Book Description
When nine-year-old Allie Finkle's parents announce that they are moving her and her brothers from their suburban split-level into an ancient Victorian in town, Allie's sure her life is over. She's not at all happy about having to give up her pretty pink wall-to-wall carpeting for creaky floorboards and creepy secret passageways-not to mention leaving her modern, state-of-the-art suburban school for a rundown, old-fashioned school just two blocks from her new house.

With a room she's half-scared to go into, the burden of being "the new girl," and her old friends all a half-hour car ride away, how will Allie ever learn to fit in?

The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari with Bonus Material ($2.99), by Robin Sharma, is available to pre-order. You can get a sample from the full priced 10th Anniversary Edition.
Book Description
With more than four million copies sold in fifty-one languages, The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari launched a bestselling series and continues to help people from every walk of life live with far greater success, happiness and meaning in these times of dramatic uncertainty.

The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari celebrates the story of Julian Mantle, a successful but misguided lawyer whose physical and emotional collapse propels him to confront his life. The result is an engaging odyssey on how to release your potential and live with passion, purpose and peace.

A brilliant blend of timeless wisdom and cutting-edge success principles, The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari is now, more than ever, a guide for the times, as countless Canadians dedicate themselves to living a life where family, work and personal fulfillment are achieved in harmonious balance.

Ashes to Dust ($2.99), is the second in the Las Vegas Mystery series by Rex Kusler, following Punctured (which is also still on sale at $2.99).
Book Description
Since first joining forces in Punctured, Alice James and Jim Snow have been a great—if odd—crime-fighting team. He’s a forty-something former Las Vegas homicide detective who quit the force to become a full-time poker player. She’s a model-turned-cocktail waitress whose foray into casino security led her into law enforcement. Together they are the James & James Detective Agency, and their newest case is a doozy. Jack Roberts comes to them for help solving the brutal murder of his daughter Laura, a cocktail waitress whose body was found burning in the Nevada desert. Among the suspects: an obsessive ex-boyfriend, a mentally unbalanced construction worker, a temperamental roommate, a shady fiancé…perhaps even the client himself! Alice knows that if they can crack this case, business will come pouring in. But first she will have to manage Snow’s ill-timed midlife crisis and deal with the chemistry crackling between them. Ashes to Dust is pure entertainment, sure to please even the most hardboiled of mystery fans.

Several books by Cherie Priest are on sale, starting with Boneshaker ($2.99), one of last year's Hugo Awards' nominees. The second in the Clockwork Century series, Clementine, is also on sale at $4.99. The other two under $5 are standalone novels, Dreadful Skin and Those Who Went Remain There Still, both from Subterranean Press.
Boneshaker
In the early days of the Civil War, rumors of gold in the frozen Klondike brought hordes of newcomers to the Pacific Northwest. Anxious to compete, Russian prospectors commissioned inventor Leviticus Blue to create a great machine that could mine through Alaska’s ice. Thus was Dr. Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine born.

But on its first test run the Boneshaker went terribly awry, destroying several blocks of downtown Seattle and unearthing a subterranean vein of blight gas that turned anyone who breathed it into the living dead.

Now it is sixteen years later, and a wall has been built to enclose the devastated and toxic city. Just beyond it lives Blue’s widow, Briar Wilkes. Life is hard with a ruined reputation and a teenaged boy to support, but she and Ezekiel are managing. Until Ezekiel undertakes a secret crusade to rewrite history.

His quest will take him under the wall and into a city teeming with ravenous undead, air pirates, criminal overlords, and heavily armed refugees. And only Briar can bring him out alive.


Clementine
Maria Isabella Boyd's success as a Confederate spy has made her too famous for further espionage work, and now her employment options are slim. Exiled, widowed, and on the brink of poverty...she reluctantly goes to work for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in Chicago.

Adding insult to injury, her first big assignment is commissioned by the Union Army. In short, a federally sponsored transport dirigible is being violently pursued across the Rockies and Uncle Sam isn't pleased. The Clementine is carrying a top secret load of military essentials--essentials which must be delivered to Louisville, Kentucky, without delay.

Intelligence suggests that the unrelenting pursuer is a runaway slave who's been wanted by authorities on both sides of the Mason-Dixon for fifteen years. In that time, Captain Croggon Beauregard Hainey has felonied his way back and forth across the continent, leaving a trail of broken banks, stolen war machines, and illegally distributed weaponry from sea to shining sea.

And now it's Maria's job to go get him.

He's dangerous quarry and she's a dangerous woman, but when forces conspire against them both, they take a chance and form an alliance. She joins his crew, and he uses her connections. She follows his orders. He takes her advice.

And somebody, somewhere, is going to rue the day he crossed either one of them.


Dreadful Skin
I ducked into a niche between a cabin and the pilot house and hiked my skirt up enough to reach down into my garter holster. I've heard it said that God made all men, but Samuel Colt made all men equal. We'd see what Mr. Colt could do for a woman.

* * * * *

Jack Gabert went to India to serve his Queen. He returned to London a violently changed man, infected with an unnatural sickness that altered his body and warped his mind.

Eileen Callaghan left an Irish convent with a revolver and a secret. She knows everything and nothing about Jack's curse, but she cannot rest until he's caught. His soul cannot be saved. It can only be returned to God.

In the years following the American Civil War, the nun and unnatural creature stalk one another across the United States. Their dangerous game of cat and mouse leads them along great rivers, across dusty plains, and into the no man's land of the unmarked western territories.

Here are three tales of the hunt. Reader, take this volume and follow these tormented souls. Learn what you can from their struggle against each other, against God, and against themselves.


Those Who Went Remain There Still
Heaster Wharton is dead, and his passing might mean an end to hostilities between the Manders and the Coys. If the the elderly patriarch showed the kindness and foresight to split his land cleanly between his feuding descendants, then a truce could be arranged.

But his final request is a strange one, delivered across the country to the straggling remnants of his tribe. Representatives from both families must visit a cave at the edge of his property in the hills of Kentucky. There, he promised, they would find his last will and testament.

But there's more than paperwork waiting underground, as vindictive old Heaster was well aware.

In 1775, Daniel Boone and a band of axe-wielding frontiersmen struggled to clear a path through the Cumberland Gap into the heart of Bluegrass country, and they did not work unopposed. Hounded and harried by an astonishing monster, the axe-men overcame the beast by sheer numbers and steel. They threw its body into a nearby cave.

It was not dead.
And now, it is not alone.

Crippled and outraged, for 100 years something terrible has huddled underground, dreaming of meat and revenge. But its newest callers are heavily armed, skeptical of their instructions, and predisposed to violence.

With their guns and their savage instincts, Heaster's grandchildren will not make for easy pickings.

I also found three collections that include Cherie Priest that are under the $5 mark (one of which I've sent to my Kindle): Grants Pass, Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters and Bewere the Night
Grants Pass
The apocalypse has arrived.

Humanity was decimated by bio-terrorism; three engineered plagues were let loose on the world. Barely anyone has survived.

Just a year before the collapse, Grants Pass, Oregon, USA, was publicly labelled as a place of sanctuary in a whimsical online, “what if” post. Now, it has become one of the last known refuges, and the hope, of mankind.

Would you go to Grants Pass based on the words of someone you’ve never met?


Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters
Monsters: As old as the oldest of stories, as new as our latest imaginings. From the ancient stone corridors of the labyrinth to the graffitied alleyways of the contemporary metropolis, they stalk the shadows. Leering from the darkness of the forest, jostling for space in our closets, they walk, crawl, creep and scuttle through our nightmares. Close as the clutter under the bed or the other side of the mirror, they are our truest companions.

Creatures features the best monster fiction from the past thirty years, offering a wide variety of the best monster stories including original stories from the field's most relevant names and hottest newcomers including Clive Barker, Sarah Langan, Joe R. Lansdale, Kelly Link, China Miéville, and Cherie Priest.


Bewere the Night
Kitsune. Werewolves. Crane wives. Selkies. Every culture has stories of such strange creatures—animals turning into humans, humans shapeshifting into animals. Sometimes seductive, sometimes bloodthirsty, but always unpredictable like nature itself, these beings are manifestations of our secret hearts, our desire to belong to both worlds: one tame and civilized, the other unfettered and full of wild impulse.

Here are stories that will make you wish you could howl at the moon until your heart bursts with longing or feel yourself shedding your human body as easily as a snake sheds its skin. Be-were the night . . . it might not kill you, but it will certainly steal you away!

Rose in Bloom: A Novella with Bonus Excerpts, by Stephanie Laurens, is currently marked down to 99 cents.
Book Description
Every Rose has its thorn…especially Rose MacKenzie-Craddock! When they were children, the willful girl was the thorn in the Earl of Strathyre’s side. Now, as a beautiful woman, Rose drives the Earl wild with desire. But even grown-ups can play some most interesting games…

This delicious novella by New York Times bestselling author Stephanie Laurens was originally published in Scottish Brides.

This exclusive ebook also includes bonus excerpts from Stephanie’s new books, Viscount Breckenridge to the Rescue and In Pursuit of Eliza Cynster.

Trickle Up Poverty: Stopping Obama's Attack on Our Borders, Economy, and Security ($4.99), by Michael Savage
Book Description
No longer can we be Barack Obama's sheeple and let the American Dream be trampled, beaten, and burned to the ground

Trickle Up Poverty, by bestselling author and revered radio host Dr. Michael Savage, is your best defense against the Obamanomics that are dragging the middle class, and everyone else, into a Marxist-Socialist death spiral. The Savage manifesto you hold in your hands shows how Obama is circumventing the Constitution to push through his radical agenda—and, most important, how we can restore our country to the power and prestige that Barack Obama and his corrupt and degenerate "czars" are trying to destroy.

The Naked Marxist can and must be stopped. Obama's trickle up poverty is infecting all that we hold to be true and self-evident. Here's how:

Impoverishing the Middle Class: Obama's confiscatory taxes, the socializing of our health-care system, and other legislative initiatives are taking away our earnings and our power to choose how we live our lives and putting it in the hands of corrupt and pro-Socialist cohorts.

Erasing Our Border with Mexico: The Homeland Security department that can't shoot straight is gutting the Constitution in the name of protecting illegal aliens when it should be focusing on keeping out the terrorists and drug dealers.

Defunding the Military and Putting Our Troops in Harm's Way: Obama's beatnik policy of taking apart our nuclear arsenal and destroying NASA, while implementing PC Rules of Engagement that don't allow our troops to protect themselves, is dangerously weakening our security and ending our military dominance.

Lining the Pockets of His Wall Street Buddies: While our 401(k)'s suffer, Obama and his Wall Street heavy contributors are creating their own legislation that is driving down stock prices while allowing his biggest campaign contributors to make trillions of dollars.

Propagandizing the Media: Once a forum for free speech, Obama's administration has systematically overrun the media in a hostile takeover with threats and false promises that serve only to pull the wool over the sheeple's eyes.

Ignoring the Tea Party—the Voice of the People: No longer a representative government, Obama is blatantly disregarding, and even suppressing, the fastest-growing collective voice in the nation right now—that of the patriotic Tea Party. His Union-Crony Purple Shirts have shown up at town-hall meetings and peaceful protests to intimidate and antagonize the democratic process.

We are dangerously close to losing the nation we love, but it's not too late. If you buy only one book to learn and react to what Obama the Destroyer has done and plans on doing to America, this is it!

Iron Lake ($0.99 Kindle, B&N), by William Kent Krueger, starts his Cork O'Connor series.
Book Description
William Kent Krueger joined the ranks of today's best suspense novelists with this thrilling, universally acclaimed debut. Conjuring "a sense of place he's plainly honed firsthand in below-zero prairie" (Kirkus Reviews), Krueger brilliantly evokes northern Minnesota's lake country -- and reveals the dark side of its snow-covered landscape.

Part Irish, part Anishinaabe Indian, Corcoran "Cork" O'Connor is the former sheriff of Aurora, Minnesota. Embittered by his "former" status, and the marital meltdown that has separated him from his children, Cork gets by on heavy doses of caffeine, nicotine, and guilt. Once a cop on Chicago's South Side, there's not much that can shock him. But when the town's judge is brutally murdered, and a young Eagle Scout is reported missing, Cork takes on a mind-jolting case of conspiracy, corruption, and scandal.

As a lakeside blizzard buries Aurora, Cork must dig out the truth among town officials who seem dead-set on stopping his investigation in its tracks. But even Cork freezes up when faced with the harshest enemy of all: a small-town secret that hits painfully close to home.

Lord and Lady Spy ($0.89 Kindle; $0.99 B&N, Sourcebooks), by Shana Galen
Book Description
Lord Adrian and Lady Bridget Smythe have the pictureperfect high society marriage. Little does the ton know that each is one of England's most preeminent spies– with their secret identities guarded even from each other. But what are secret agents to do when the spying game is over and they suddenly discover a whole new spark in each other?

Already Gone ($4.99), John Rector's third novel, is currently marked half price by Amazon's Thomas & Mercer imprint.
Book Description
Jake Reese is a writing teacher at an American university. He lives in a small brick Tudor close to campus with his art buyer wife, Diane. His life is quiet-Ordinary even. And he likes it that way. But it wasn't always quiet. Jake's distant past was a life on the streets, inflicting damage and suffering on more people than he can count. And now someone from his past, it seems, has come looking for him.

A raw, gripping thriller about the price paid for past sins, John Rector's third novel is a live wire that crackles with the intensity of a man who has nothing left to lose. When two men attack Jake in a parking lot and cut off his ring finger, he tries to dismiss it as an unlucky case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But when events take a more sinister turn and Diane goes missing, Jake knows he can no longer hide from the truth.

As he embarks on a mission to find his wife, he realizes his dark past is refusing to stay buried, and that his future is about to unfold in ways he could never have imagined.

With taut and brooding prose, Rector paints a formidable portrait of a reformed man's slow descent into a life he thought he had walked away from forever. As the intensity becomes almost unbearable, the pace quickens and the suspense applies an unrelenting, vice-like grip, as ALREADY GONE hurtles toward its ultimate, explosive climax.

Get the first three titles in Chelsea Cain's Archie and Gretchen series for $4.99 each: Heartsick, Sweetheart and Evil at Heart.
Heartsick
Damaged Portland detective Archie Sheridan spent ten years tracking Gretchen Lowell, a beautiful serial killer, but in the end she was the one who caught him. Two years ago, Gretchen kidnapped Archie and tortured him for ten days, but instead of killing him, she mysteriously decided to let him go. She turned herself in, and now Gretchen has been locked away for the rest of her life, while Archie is in a prison of another kind---addicted to pain pills, unable to return to his old life, powerless to get those ten horrific days off his mind. Archie's a different person, his estranged wife says, and he knows she's right. He continues to visit Gretchen in prison once a week, saying that only he can get her to confess as to the whereabouts of more of her victims, but even he knows the truth---he can't stay away.

When another killer begins snatching teenage girls off the streets of Portland, Archie has to pull himself together enough to lead the new task force investigating the murders. A hungry young newspaper reporter, Susan Ward, begins profiling Archie and the investigation, which sparks a deadly game between Archie, Susan, the new killer, and even Gretchen. They need to catch a killer, and maybe somehow then Archie can free himself from Gretchen, once and for all. Either way, Heartsick makes for one of the most extraordinary suspense debuts in recent memory.


Sweetheart
With Heartsick, Chelsea Cain took the crime world by storm, introducing two of the most compelling characters in decades: serial killer Gretchen Lowell and her obsessed pursuer Portland Detective Archie Sheridan. The book spent four weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and garnered rave reviews around the world. But the riveting story of Archie and Gretchen was left unfinished, and now Chelsea Cain picks up the tale again.

When the body of a young woman is discovered in Portland’s Forest Park, Archie is reminded of the last time they found a body there, more than a decade ago: it turned out to be the Beauty Killer’s first victim, and Archie’s first case. This body can't be one of Gretchen's—she’s in prison—but after help from reporter Susan Ward uncovers the dead woman's identity, it turns into another big case. Trouble is, Archie can't focus on the new investigation because the Beauty Killer case has exploded: Gretchen Lowell has escaped from prison.

Archie hadn't seen her in two months; he'd moved back in with his family and sworn off visiting her. Though it should feel like progress, he actually feels worse. The news of her escape spreads like wildfire, but secretly, he's relieved. He knows he's the only one who can catch her, and in fact, he has a plan to get out from under her thumb once and for all.

Chelsea Cain has topped her own bestselling debut thriller with this unputdownable, unpredictable, edge-of-your-seat read.


Evil at Heart
Chelsea Cain’s novels featuring Portland detective Archie Sheridan and serial killer Gretchen Lowell have captivated fans through two nail-biting entries, Heartsick and Sweetheart, both of them multiweek bestsellers in The New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly.

Gretchen Lowell is still on the loose. These days, she’s more of a cause célèbre than a feared killer, thanks to sensationalist news coverage that has made her a star. Her face graces magazine covers weekly and there have been sightings of her around the world. Most shocking of all, Portland Herald reporter Susan Ward has uncovered a bizarre kind of fan club, which celebrates the number of days she’s been free.

Archie Sheridan hunted her for a decade, and after his last ploy to catch her went spectacularly wrong, remains hospitalized months later. When they last spoke, they entered a détente of sorts---Archie agreed not to kill himself if she agreed not to kill anyone else. But when a new body is found accompanied by Gretchen’s trademark heart, all bets are off and Archie is forced back into action. Has the Beauty Killer returned to her gruesome ways, or has the cult surrounding her created a whole new evil?

Chelsea Cain continues to deliver heart-stopping thrills and chills in the latest entry in this dynamic bestselling series

In for a Penny ($3.79), by Rose Lerner
Book Description
IN FOR A PENNY
No more drinking. No more gambling. And definitely no more mistress. Now that he's inherited a mountain of debts and responsibility, Lord Nevinstoke has no choice but to start acting respectable. Especially if he wants to find a wife--better yet, a rich wife. Penelope Brown, a manufacturing heiress, seems the perfect choice. She's pretty, rational, ladylike, and looking for a marriage based on companionship and mutual esteem.

IN FOR A POUND

But when they actually get to Nev's family estate, all the respectability and reason in the world won't be enough to deal with tenants on the edge of revolt, a menacing neighbor, and Nev's family's propensity for scandal. Overwhelmed but determined to set things right, Nev and Penelope have no one to turn to but each other. And to their surprise, that just might be enough.

Alice Waters and Chez Panisse ($4.99), by Thomas McNamee
Book Description
The first authorized biography of "the mother of American cooking" (The New York Times)

This adventurous book charts the origins of the local "market cooking" culture that we all savor today. When Francophile Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1971, few Americans were familiar with goat cheese, cappuccino, or mesclun. But it wasn't long before Waters and her motley coterie of dreamers inspired a new culinary standard incorporating ethics, politics, and the conviction that the best-grown food is also the tastiest. Based on unprecedented access to Waters and her inner circle, this is a truly delicious rags-to-riches saga.

Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports ($4.99), by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams
Book Description
The blockbuster New York Times bestseller that caused a media firestorm and stayed in the headlines for weeks at last arrives in paperback—with a new afterword about the Barry Bonds perjury investigation.

This is the complete inside story of the BALCO steroids scandal from the award-winning reporters who broke the news nationally. In the summer of 1998, as baseball was still struggling to regain popularity lost during the contentious 1994 players’ strike that caused the World Series to be canceled, a race to break the home-run record transfixed the nation. Over the next three seasons, baseball players across the country hit home runs at unprecedented rates. Although sportswriters pointed to suspicions of “juiced” baseballs and small parks being responsible, there were whispers that illegal performance-enhancing drugs were being used. But home runs were big business, and baseball carried on with a weak performance-drug testing regime.

In December of 2004, after more than a year of investigation, San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams broke the story that in a federal investigation of a nutritional supplement company called BALCO, Barry Bonds and fellow slugger Jason Giambi had admitted to taking steroids. Immediately the issue of steroids in baseball became front-page news. In Game of Shadows, Fainaru-Wada and Williams expose the secrets of BALCO, illuminating how professional athletes risked their health for a competitive edge.

Supercoach: 10 Secrets to Transform Anyone's Life ($1.79), by Michael Neill
Book Description
IF SUPERMAN NEEDED A COACH, HE’D HIRE MICHAEL NEILL!

In this fun, easy-to-read book, best-selling author and internationally renowned success coach Michael Neill shares the secrets of transforming your life and the lives of the people you care about most—your family, friends, colleagues, and clients.
Inside, you will learn:
  • How to stop thinking like a victim
  • The secret to financial security in any economy
  • Proven techniques to produce dramatic changes in yourself and others
  • Simple ways to create lasting relationships
  • The key to lifelong happiness
  • Strategies for increasing productivity, energy, well-being . . . and more!
Whether you want to powerfully impact the lives of the people around you or simply wish to create a deeper, more meaningful experience of being alive, this book is your essential guide to helping yourself and assisting others.

Is Heaven Real?: Meditations on Scriptures about the Afterlife ($0.99), by Zondervan Bibles
Book Description
Is Heaven Real? It seems this is an eternal question; one that is as relevant today as at any time in history. This much-debated topic has spurred untold numbers of books, blogs, discussions, and sermons -- but in the end, what matters most is what the Bible says about heaven. This booklet is the place to turn to find the answer.Packed with carefully selected scripture from the popular New International Version (NIV) of the Bible, Is Heaven Real? also includes fascinating and reassuring quotations from trusted contemporary and ancient authors. Broken into sections, this small book guides you through the big questions: What and where is heaven? What can I expect after death? What does the Bible say about the experience of this mysterious, wonderful place? So dig in, read what the Bible reveals about heaven, and spend a few minutes meditating on what it means for your life---here and now, today.

LoveScopes: What Astrology Knows about You and the Ones You Love ($2.69), by Mark S. Husson
Book Description
Each week thousands of listeners tune in to Mark Husson’s Power Peek Hour on Hay House Radio. They know they’ll gain insights into themselves and their relationships that they can only get from astrology, and they trust Mark as the one to lay it on the line for them. Now he leads you on this expedition of love by zodiac sign.

In this book, Mark takes the astrological signs two-by-two and shines the light of understanding on their relationship with each other. He gives each a LoveScope score to predict the potential success right from the beginning. You can use that score to learn how things can go better, how much effort you’ll need to invest, and how to take a good relationship and make it into a great one.

Do you want to know what draws you to your partner? Or how to draw out the best in this person? Mark maps this out for you with wisdom, humor, and simplicity, all from his perspective as a trained psychologist. LoveScopes addresses specific characteristics of each sign alone and in partnership, referencing powerful mythological archetypes to illustrate the principles. Let LoveScopes help you fix relationships you have . . . and help you prepare to plunge into those you want!

am I being kind ($2.69), by Michael J. Chase
Book Description
Imagine if one simple question could change your life...and your world. Awakening the reader like caffeine for the heart, am I being kind revives the spirit and blazes a direct path to a more peaceful and kindhearted world. In this captivating guide to personal transformation, author and inspirational speaker Michael J. Chase reveals how one simple question has the power to change your life and the lives of those around you. As you ask, “am I being kind” in seven vital areas of your life, you discover the secret to creating unlimited joy, inner peace, and the life you’ve always dreamed of. Having experienced the “art of unkindness” throughout much of his life, Michael shares his own journey of self-discovery and the lessons learned from unlikely spiritual teachers along the way. Through riveting true stories and a unique step-by-step program, am I being kind shows you how the astonishing power of kindness can change your heart, your life, and ultimately, your world.

The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion ($2.99), by Peter L. Berger (Open Road)
Book Description
Influential scholar Peter L. Berger explores the sociological underpinnings of religion and the rise of a modern secular society

Acclaimed scholar and sociologist Peter L. Berger carefully lays out an understanding of religion as a historical, societal mechanism in this classic work of social theory. Berger examines the roots of religious belief and its gradual dissolution in modern times, applying a general theoretical perspective to specific examples from religions throughout the ages.

Building upon the author’s previous work, The Social Construction of Reality, with Thomas Luckmann, this book makes Berger’s case that human societies build a “sacred canopy” to protect, stabilize, and give meaning to their worldview.

For a limited time, all of 24/7 TUTOR's language tutorials are marked down to 99 cents. Each of four languages is covered with both a Vocabulary and a Basic Phrases Kindle App.
App Description
Learn Spanish, Italian, German or French with your own personal language tutor.

24-7 Vocabulary and 24-7 Basic Phrases are a fun way to learn a language. Going beyond a talking phrasebook or set of flashcards, these titles provides a set of interactive study tools to help you learn the language, including traditional flashcards, a multiple choice quiz, an entertaining hangman-style game, and a write-in quiz to test language recall.

Vocabulary: Content includes basic vocabulary organized in 21 categories including Family & Friends, Travel, Home, Office, School, Countryside, Around Town, Other Nouns, Food & Drink, Clothing, Weather, Time & Date, Pronouns, Adjectives, Opposites, Colors, Descriptives and Numbers. Vocabulary is different from 24-7's other language tutor title (Basic Phrases) in that it provides basic vocabulary terms versus full phrases.

Basic Phrases: Content includes conversational phrases organized in 13 categories including First Phrases, Greetings, Getting to Know, Communication, Questions, Wants, Needs, Feelings, Common Expressions, Interjections, To Go, and other common and miscellaneous phrases. Basic Phrases is different from 24-7's other language tutor title (Vocabulary) in that it provides full phrases versus basic vocabulary terms.

Vocabulary and Basic Phrases are useful tools for beginners who may wish to refresh basic language skills, and great companions for a trip in a non-English-speaking country.

Friday, September 23, 2011

Free Book (nook) - Gap Creek

Gap Creek: The Story of a Marriage ($7.16), by Robert Morgan, is this week's Free Friday book at Barnes & Noble. I've reported the lower price to Amazon and hopefully they will match it in a day or two.
Book Description
There is a most unusual woman living in Gap Creek. Julie Harmon works hard, "hard as a man," they say, so hard that at times she's not sure she can stop. People depend on her to slaughter the hogs and nurse the dying. People are weak, and there is so much to do. She is just a teenager when her little brother dies in her arms. That same year she marries and moves down into the valley where floods and fire and visions visit themselves on her, and con men and drunks and lawyers come calling.

Julie and her husband discover that the modern world is complex and that it grinds ever on without pause or concern for their hard work. To survive, they must find out whether love can keep chaos and madness at bay.

Robert Morgan's latest novel, Gap Creek, returns his readers to the vivid world of the Appalachian high country. Julie and Hank's new life in the valley of Gap Creek in the last years of the nineteenth century is more complicated than the couple ever imagined. Sometimes it's hard to tell what to fear most-the fires and floods or the flesh-and-blood grifters, drunks, and busybodies who insinuate themselves into their new lives. Their struggles with nature, with work, with the changing century, and with their disappointments and triumphs make this a riveting follow-up to Morgan's acclaimed novel, The Truest Pleasure.
Get the free ebook from Barnes & Noble.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Today's Deals and Bargain Books

Bike Snob: Systematically and Mercilessly Realigning the World of Cycling ($1.99), by BikeSnobNYC and Christopher Koelle, is today's Kindle Deal of the Day.
Book Description
Cycling is exploding -- in a good way. Urbanites everywhere, from ironic hipsters to earth-conscious commuters, are taking to the bike like aquatic mammals to water. BikeSnobNYC -- cycling's most prolific, well-known, hilarious, and anonymous blogger -- brings a fresh and humorous perspective to the most important vehicle to hit personal transportation since the horse. Bike Snob treats readers to a laugh-out-loud rant and rave about the world of bikes and their riders, and offers a unique look at the ins and outs of cycling, from its history and hallmarks to its wide range of bizarre practitioners. Throughout, the author lampoons the missteps, pretensions, and absurdities of bike culture while maintaining a contagious enthusiasm for cycling itself. Bike Snob is an essential volume for anyone who knows, is, or wants to become a cyclist.

Timequake is just one of 18 novels by Kurt Vonnegut that are currently marked down to $3.99 each.
Book Description
TIMEQUAKE (1997) exists in two conjoined versions ("Timequake One"/"Timequake Two") and in meta-fictional mode is a novel about a novel, composed in short, arbitrary chapters and using its large cast of characters and disoriented chronology to mimic the "timequake" which is its subject. Some cosmic upheaval has hurled the entire population a decade back where, in full consciousness (but helplessly entrapped) everyone’s pitiable and embarrassing mistakes are helplessly enacted again. By this stage of his life - he was 72 the year the novel was published - Vonnegut was still wearing his luminescent bells and Harlequin's cape, but these had become dusty and the cape no longer fitted; here, Vonnegut’s exasperation and sense of futility could no longer be concealed or shaped, and this novel is a laboratory of technique (deliberately) gone wrong, a study of breakdown. Vonnegut had never shown much hope in his work for human destiny or occupation; the naive optimism of Eliot Rosewater in GOD BLESS YOU, MR. ROSEWATER had in the damaged veteran Billy Pilgrim of SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE become a naive fantasy of escape to a sexual heaven. In the nihilism of TIMEQUAKE the only escape is re-enactment but re-enactment has lost hope and force. This is no Groundhog Day in which Vonnegut traps his various refugees (many escaped from his earlier works) but a hell of lost possibility. The temporal timequake of the title is the actual spiritual fracture of the 20th century, and in his 73rd year Vonnegut envisions no hope, not even the hollow diversions of SLAPSTICK. Vonnegut’s imaginative journey, closely tracked by his work, is one of the most intriguing for any American writer of the twentieth century.

Spider's Bite ($1.99), the first title in the Elemental Assassin series by Jennifer Estep, looks like the start of another urban fantasy series that you won't be able to put down. I've already sent it to my Kindle to read next.
Book Description
My name is Gin, and I kill people.

They call me the Spider. I'm the most feared assassin in the South -- when I'm not busy at the Pork Pit cooking up the best barbecue in Ashland. As a Stone elemental, I can hear everything from the whispers of the gravel beneath my feet to the vibrations of the soaring Appalachian Mountains above me. My Ice magic also comes in handy for making the occasional knife. But I don't use my powers on the job unless I absolutely have to. Call it professional pride.

Now that a ruthless Air elemental has double-crossed me and killed my handler, I'm out for revenge. And I'll exterminate anyone who gets in my way -- good or bad. I may look hot, but I'm still one of the bad guys. Which is why I'm in trouble, since irresistibly rugged Detective Donovan Caine has agreed to help me. The last thing this coldhearted killer needs when I'm battling a magic more powerful than my own is a sexy distraction...especially when Donovan wants me dead just as much as the enemy.

In Pursuit of a Scandalous Lady ($1.99), by Gayle Callen, is the start of her Scandalous Lady historical romance series.
Book Description
Entranced by a portrait, haunted by scandal, he would stop at nothing to learn the truth . . . even if it led to their utter ruin.

Hold Zero! ($1.99), by Jean Craighead George, The Kid from Tomkinsville ($1.99), by John R. Tunis, and The Planet of Junior Brown ($2.99), by Virginia Hamilton, are all for middle-grade readers and published by Open Road.
Hold Zero!
Craig and his friends have a big secret—they’ve built a real, working rocket. But will the countdown to takeoff begin before they’re discovered?

Best friends Craig, Steve, Johnny, and Phil have spent months building a rocket—not some model or a toy, but a real rocket, with boosters and a launch pad and a remote control panel. Even better, they’ve managed to pull off the whole project in secret.

The boys can’t wait to launch their rocket . . . but then their parents find out what they’ve been up to and tell the police. When they see how sophisticated the rocket really is, the police insist on inspecting all the blueprints and calculations, and the boys find themselves in a lot of trouble. Will their project go up in smoke?

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Jean Craighead George, including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.


The Kid from Tomkinsville
Rookie pitcher Roy Tucker is full of hope for his first season with the Brooklyn Dodgers—and hope might be what the team needs most

Roy Tucker—a small-town kid from Tomkinsville, Connecticut—has quit his job at the drugstore and packed up for Dodgers training camp in Clearwater, Florida, hoping to make the team as a rookie pitcher. He expects the field to be competitive and realizes he might not pass muster, but after just one practice, he discovers just how difficult a goal he has set.

But the Dodgers are an aging team, and owner Jack MacManus is getting tired of the smart remarks from sports reporters and the manager of the rival Giants, Bill Murphy. With a little coaching and encouragement from Dave Leonard, the oldest catcher in the big leagues, this kid from Tomkinsville might be just what the team needs.


The Planet of Junior Brown
Junior Brown is a musical prodigy losing touch with reality and everyone around him—except for one important friend.

Junior Brown is different than the other kids in his eighth-grade class. For one, he weighs three hundred pounds. He’s also a talented musician with a serious future as a professional pianist—if he survives middle school. With an overbearing mom, disappointed teachers, and fellow students who tease him mercilessly, Junior starts to slip away into his own mind. His last hope may be his only friend, Buddy Clark, a boy in his class without a home or family who has already learned some of life’s toughest lessons.

Four of Donna Leon's Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery titles are marked down to $4.80 each.
Uniform Justice #12
As Uniform Justice opens, Venetian detective Commissario Guido Brunetti is called to investigate a parent's worst nightmare. A young cadet has been found hanged, a presumed suicide, in Venice's elite military academy. Brunetti's sorrow for the boy, so close in age to his own son, is rivaled only by his contempt for a community that is more concerned with protecting the reputation of the school, and its privileged students, than understanding this tragedy. The young man is the son of a doctor and former politician, a man of an impeccable integrity all too rare in Italian politics. Dr. Moro is clearly and understandably devastated by his son's death; but while both he and his apparently estranged wife seem convinced that the boy's death could not have been suicide, neither appears eager to talk to the police or involve Brunetti in any investigation of the circumstances in which he died. As Brunetti pursues his inquiry, he is faced with a wall of silence. Is the military protecting its own? And what of the other witnesses? Is this the natural reluctance of Italians to involve themselves with the authorities, or is Brunetti facing a conspiracy far greater than this one death?

Doctored Evidence #13
Donna Leon's riveting new novel, Doctored Evidence, follows Commissario Guido Brunetti down the winding streets of contemporary Venice as he throws open the doors of a case his superiors would rather leave closed. When a miserly spinster is found brutally murdered in her Venice apartment, police immediately suspect her Romanian housekeeper. They are certain their job is done after the immigrant dies while fleeing arrest, but weeks later; a neighbor comes forward to defend the innocence of the accused. The only investigator who believes the alibi is Brunetti, who will have to go behind the backs of his superiors to vindicate the Romanian and find her employer's actual killer. As always, the indispensable hacking skills of the ever-loyal Signorina Elettra are the perfect complement to Brunetti's meticulous detective work. She discovers mysterious deposits in the old woman's bank account, but who made them? As Brunetti investigates, his wife, at home, reads him teachings on the Seven Deadly Sins. In a modern world of intrigue and nebulous morality, how do they relate to the murder at hand? Doctored Evidence is charged with suspense and evokes a contemporary Venice with Donna Leon's masterful flair.

Blood from a Stone #14
Blood from a Stone brings Donna Leon's celebrated character Commissario Guido Brunetti back on the scene: On a cold Venetian night shortly before Christmas, a street vendor is killed in a scuffle in Campo San Stefano. The closest witnesses to the event are the tourists who had been browsing the man's wares before his death-fake handbags of every designer label. The dead man is one of the many African immigrants purveying goods outside normal shop hours and trading without a work permit.

Like everybody involved, Commissario Brunetti wonders why anyone would kill an illegal immigrant. But once Brunetti begins to investigate this unfamiliar Venetian underworld, he discovers that matters of great value are at stake within the secretive society.

Warned by Patta, his superior, to resist further involvement in the case, Brunetti only becomes more determined to unearth the truth behind this mysterious killing. Reluctant as he is to let this event be smugly relegated to the category of "not worth dealing with," how far will Brunetti be able to penetrate the murky subculture in this illegal community? Blood from a Stone is an exquisite and irresistible mystery offering an unexpected take on life in contemporary Venice.


Through a Glass, Darkly #15
Donna Leon opens doors to the hidden Venice like no one else. With her latest novel, Through a Glass, Darkly, Leon takes us inside the secretive island of Murano, home of the world-famous glass factories. On a luminous spring day in Venice, Commissario Brunetti and his assistant Vianello play hooky from the Questura in order to help Vianello's friend Marco Ribetti, arrested during an environmental protest. They secure his release, only to be faced by the fury of the man's father-in-law, Giovanni De Cal, a cantankerous glass factory owner who has been heard in the bars of Murano making violent threats about Ribetti. Brunetti's curiosity is piqued, and he finds himself drawn to Murano to investigate. Is De Cal the type of man to carry out his threats? Then one morning the body of De Cal's night watchman is found. Over long lunches, on secret boat rides, in quiet bars, and down narrow streets, Brunetti searches for the killer. Will he unravel the clues before the night watchman's death is allowed to be forgotten?

A fascinating novel set in the intersection between tourism and native Venetian society, Through a Glass, Darkly is Donna Leon at her finest.

Chasing the Night ($2.99), by Iris Johansen, is the eleventh title in her popular Eve Duncan series.
Book Description
A CIA agent’s two-year-old child was stolen in the night as a brutal act of vengeance. Now, eight years later, this torment is something Catherine Ling awakens to every day. Her friends, family, and colleagues tell her to let go, move on, accept that her son is never coming back. But she can’t. Catherine needs to find someone as driven and obsessed as she is to help her— and that person is Eve Duncan. She knows that Eve shares her nightmare, since closure is also something that eludes Eve after the disappearance of her daughter Bonnie. Now, Eve must take her talents as a forensic sculptor to another level, using age progression as a way to unite Catherine with her child. As Eve gets drawn deeper into Catherine’s horror, she must face looming demons of her own.

Bonnie’s killer is still out there. And a new killer is taunting Eve and Catherine at every turn. Is Catherine’s son alive, or not? These two women endure the worst fear any mother can imagine in Iris Johansen’s latest thrill ride, a gut-wrenching journey into the darkest places of the soul.

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Free Book (nook) - Tuscan Holiday

Tuscan Holiday ($8.96 Kindle), by Holly Chamberlin, is free from B&N tonight. This title has previously been free in the Kindle store (Jun '10), but feel free to report this lower price (as not everyone had a chance to get it the first time around).

Book Description
In this smart, tender, insightful new novel, bestselling author Holly Chamberlin introduces two very different women who, over the course of two unforgettable weeks, learn about unbreakable bonds, unshakeable love, and the chances that come once in a lifetime -- and change us forever...When Elizabeth Caldwell planned a trip to Florence with her daughter, Marina, she secretly hoped for a warm, fuzzy bonding experience worthy of a Lifetime movie. But Marina -- twenty-one, newly graduated, and close to her mom in many ways -- has always been more the PBS type: dependable, practical, and completely in control. Elizabeth knows Marina wants to avoid the kind of "stupid mistake" that left Elizabeth a single mother at twenty-two, and she's bitten her tongue as Marina settles for a wealthy fiance who gives her everything she thinks she wants. After all, Elizabeth? -- unable to bring herself to fully commit to the man she has dated for years -- is hardly an expert in romance. Still, a lot can happen on vacation, especially in Tuscany, where every scent borne on the warm breeze inspires delight, and every view makes the heart soar. There, on streets once walked by Dante and Michaelangelo, Marina is blindsided by a gorgeous Italian named Luca who shows her how gloriously unpredictable passion can be, and Elizabeth finally lets go of the role that has defined her for so long to embrace her own uncertain future...

Click HERE to get the free book from B&N.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Free Book (EPUB) - Only You

Update: Also free from Borders.
Only You, by Deborah Grace Staley, is free in the Kobo ebookstore. This book has previously been free for Kindle (Oct '10).

Book Description

A charming romance about the lives and loves of people in a small Tennessee town. In the tradition of Debbie Macomber.

"Hey, ya'll. Dixie Ferguson here. I run Ferguson's Diner in Angel Ridge, Tennessee. Population three hundred forty-five. It's a picturesque town in the valley of the Little Tennessee River, established in 1785. In the early days, its first families--the McKays, the Wallaces, the Houstons, the Joneses, and, of course, the Craigs--staked their claims on hundreds of acres of the richest bottom land anyone had ever seen. After all the years I've spent behind the counter at Ferguson's, I could probably tell ya'll a story about near everyone in town. But we only have so much time, so I'll narrow it down to just two for now. This is a story about coming home. It's also a story about acceptin' folks for who they are. You could say it's a story about Josie Allen, a librarian, and Cole Craig, a handyman, but I say it's a story about finding love where you'd least expect to."


Click HERE to get the free book from Borders.
Click HERE to get the free book from Kobo.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Free Audiobook - Walden

For Earth Day, Tantor Audio is giving away the unabridged audiobook of Walden ($6.41 Kindle), by Henry David Thoreau, narrated by Mel Foster. The download is a huge zip file containing the book in MP3 format (compatible with Kindle), in 20 parts.

Book Description
Walden is the classic account of two years spent by Henry David Thoreau living at Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. The story is detailed in its accounts of Thoreau's day-to-day activities, observations, and undertakings to survive out in the wilderness for two years. Thoreau's journal is an exquisite account of a man seeking a more simple life by living in harmony with nature. In today's fast-paced consumer-driven society, the austere lifestyle endorsed by Thoreau is as relevant and refreshing as ever.

Click HERE to get the free download. If you don't already have an account with Tantor, you'll need to create one (no credit card info is required to set up the account).

Update: The link at Tantor is now for a streaming listen only. However, you can still get the audiobook free at Learn Out Loud, HERE.

Monday, April 4, 2011

Free Book (nook) - Petals From The Sky

Update: 4/5/11 No longer free at B&N.
Petals From The Sky ($7.99 Kindle), by Mingmei Yip, is a repeat freebie (Mar '10) at Barnes and Noble.

Book Description
From the acclaimed author of Peach Blossom Pavilion comes a lush and lyrical novel of East and West--and of one young woman's search for her heart's true calling. . .

When twenty-year-old Meng Ning declares that she wants to be a Buddhist nun, her mother is aghast. In her eyes, a nun's life means only deprivation--"no freedom, no love, no meat." But to Meng Ning, it means the chance to control her own destiny, and to live in an oasis of music, art, and poetry far from her parents' unhappy union.

With an enigmatic nun known as Yi Kong, "Depending on Emptiness," as her mentor, Meng Ning spends the next ten years studying abroad, disdaining men, and preparing to enter the nunnery. Then, a fire breaks out at her Buddhist retreat, and Meng Ning is carried to safety by Michael Fuller, a young American doctor. The unprecedented physical contact stirs her curiosity. And as their tentative friendship grows intimate, Meng Ning realizes she must choose between the sensual and the spiritual life.

From the austere beauty of China's Buddhist temples to the whirlwind of Manhattan's social elite, and the brilliant bustle of Paris and Hong Kong, here is a novel of joy and heartbreak--and of the surprising paths that lead us where we most need to be.


Click HERE for the free book from B&N.

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Free Book (ADE/PDF) - Thousands of Broadways

Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town ($9.99 Kindle), by Robert Pinsky, is free from the University of Chicago this month.

Book Description
Broadway, the main street that runs through Robert Pinsky’s home town of Long Branch, New Jersey, was once like thousands of other main streets in small towns across the country. But for Pinsky, one of America’s most admired poets and its former Poet Laureate, this Broadway is the point of departure for a lively journey through the small towns of the American imagination. Thousands of Broadways explores the dreams and nightmares of such small towns—their welcoming yet suffocating, warm yet prejudicial character during their heyday, from the early nineteenth century through World War II.

The citizens of quintessential small towns know one another extensively and even intimately, but fail to recognize the geniuses and criminal minds in their midst. Bringing the works of such figures as Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Alfred Hitchcock, Thornton Wilder, Willa Cather, and Preston Sturges to bear on this paradox, as well as reflections on his own time growing up in a small town, Pinsky explores how such imperfect knowledge shields communities from the anonymity and alienation of modern life. Along the way, he also considers how small towns can be small minded—in some cases viciously judgmental and oppressively provincial. Ultimately, Pinsky examines the uneasy regard that creative talents like him often have toward the small towns that either nurtured or thwarted their artistic impulses.

Of living in a small town, Sherwood Anderson once wrote that "the sensation is one never to be forgotten. On all sides are ghosts, not of the dead, but of living people." Passionate, lyrical, and intensely moving, Thousands of Broadways is a rich exploration of this crucial theme in American literature by one of its most distinguished figures.


Click HERE to sign up for the free book. You'll need to enter your email address, then check your email for the link to download the book. Mine arrived within seconds -- you get a .ACSM file, which, when opened, will load the PDF book inside of Adobe ADE. This is a DRM'd PDF that is not compatible with the Kindle.

Friday, October 1, 2010

Mini Shopaholic for $1.49 (EPUB)

I know that the lower price has been reported to Amazon (by at least two of us), but I somehow doubt that they will match the price on this one. Ereadable.com has Mini Shopaholic, by Sophie Kinsella, on sale for $1.49. It's selling at Amazon for $9.99 on Kindle and is still in hardcover, since it only released two weeks ago. It may be worth checking on an off the next few days, though, if you can't take advantage of this price on the EPUB edition.

I took a chance (I had not dealt with this company before), and have in ADE now (The only format available is EPUB with ADE-DRM), ready to load on one of my non-Kindle readers. I scanned thru the pages and checked first few against the Kindle for Web preview and it looks like the entire book at a bargain price. What with the big sale that Fictionwise has on these recently, that completes the series for me (now, to find time to read them).

Book Description
Sophie Kinsella has dazzled readers with her irresistible Shopaholic novels—sensational international bestsellers that have garnered millions of devoted fans and catapulted her into the first rank of contemporary storytellers. Now her beloved heroine Becky Brandon (née Bloomwood) returns in a hilarious tale of married life, toddlerhood, and the perils of trying to give a fabulous surprise party—on a budget!

Becky Brandon thought motherhood would be a breeze and that having a daughter was a dream come true: a shopping friend for life! But it’s trickier than she thought. Two-year-old Minnie has a quite different approach to shopping.

Minnie creates havoc everywhere she goes, from Harrods to her own christening. Her favorite word is “Mine!” and she’s even trying to get into eBay! On top of everything else, Becky and Luke are still living with her parents (the deal on house #4 has fallen through), when suddenly there’s a huge financial crisis.

With people having to “cut back,” Becky decides to throw a surprise party for Luke to cheer everyone up. But when costs start to spiral out of control, she must decide whether to accept help from an unexpected source—and therefore run the risk of hurting the person she loves.

Will Becky be able to pull off the celebration of the year? Will she and Luke ever find a home of their own? Will Minnie ever learn to behave? And . . . most important . . . will Becky’s secret wishes ever come true?


Click HERE to get the book from eReadable.com.


Monday, September 13, 2010

Bargain Book Roundup, Part V

Baby Jack ($1.67), by Frank Schaeffer

Book Description
Todd Ogden, an acclaimed painter with work in museums around the world and a seemingly successful thirty-year marriage to the Brahmin Sarah, is living and painting in his two-hundred-year-old Massachusetts farmhouse when his youngest child, Jack, chooses the Marines over college. Feeling puzzled and ultimately infuriated by his son’s incomprehensible switch to "the other side," a situation only further aggravated by his disapproval of Jack’s girlfriend Jessica, Todd ultimately turns his back on his son. Not long after the start of Gulf War II, Jack is deployed to Iraq and killed a week later, trying to fend off an ambush.

From this point on, Baby Jack tells the story of the family Jack leaves behind, of his parents trying to survive as their marriage shatters, of Todd’s own breakdown and after-the-fact attempt to understand his son’s life—and of Jessica’s perseverance and the baby to whom she gives birth after Jack’s death.

Baby Jack is a powerful and moving_human story of sacrifice and redemption, which takes its readers into a territory way beyond the everyday.


Ultimate Weapon ($2.35), by Chris Ryan

Book Description
The new blockbuster from the bestselling author of The Increment and Greed — a former SAS commander and the only member of his team to escape from Iraq during the Gulf War.

Three people. Three stories. And a dangerous struggle for survival in a country ravaged by war.

Nick Scott fought in the SAS during the first Gulf War. Captured and tortured, he was left a broken man. His daughter Sarah Scott is a beautiful young scientist who has cracked one of the scientific secrets of the age. Now, she has vanished.

Her lover Jed Bradley is one of the SAS’s toughest young agents, dropped behind enemy lines in the build-up to the Iraq War to find the truth about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Caught in the midst of a global power play, Nick and Jed must fight their way through a war-ravaged Iraq as the regime of Saddam Hussein collapses around them.

It is a desperate race to find the woman they both love . . . and to unlock the secret of the Ultimate Weapon.


The Silver Bear ($2.36), by Derek Haas

Book Description
The intense psychological portrait of a hitman--the anti-Jason Bourne--as he stalks his prey from Boston to LA. He wants you to know him, maybe even admire him, but only for his excellence in his craft. Perhaps he was even born for it. ""A natural killer,"" his mentor--a middleman named Vespucci--said he was. He proved it with his first professional hit: a Fifth Circuit Court judge in Boston, executed with a sheet of Saran Wrap in the stairwell of her own courthouse. He's proved his merit often, usually with a Glock semiautomatic, but he's improvised too, with his bare hands, the heel of a shoe, knives, even a sewing machine. He is the consummate assassin, at the top of his form, immune to the psychological strains of his chosen profession. He is what the Russians call a Silver Bear. He calls himself Columbus. It's the name Vespucci gave him, ten years ago, when he discovered a dark, new world of fences, clients, marks, jobs, jack. Not that his real name meant much to him anyway. He never knew his father or his mother, a prostitute who became dangerously involved back in the seventies with an earnest young congressman named Abe Mann, then a rising star in the Democratic Party. The magnetic Abe Mann has since become the Speaker of the House. He is currently running for the Democratic nomination in an exhausting presidential campaign, weaving his way across the country. Columbus is not far behind. But as he pieces together his past and prepares the seamless assassination of his mark, the criminal underworld he has always ruled begins unraveling violently around him.

Fiesta Moon ($1.24), by Linda Windsor, is the second book in the The Moonstruck series.

Book Description
Dear Reader, are you ready for more moonstruck madness? Mix a sassy senorita, an incorrigible Don Juan, and a haunted hacienda, and you get page-turning intrigue and romance.

When American social worker Corinne Diaz arrives at a remote mountain village to volunteer at a local orphanage, she thinks it's a slice of Mexican heaven...until Mark Madison shows up. Saved once again from the clink by his brother, the engineer promises to stay sober and fly right.

Battling the kindling chemistry between them, the stubborn opposites are determined to dispel an old superstition threatening the new orphanage. As the dilemma becomes more sinister, things get hotter than a basket of habaneros. Little do Corinne and Mark realize that while they work to save the project-and their lives-the Mexicalli moon is working on them.

Sometimes an added pinch of faith can make just about anything possible!


The Ruby in Her Navel: A Novel of Love and Intrigue in the 12th Century ($3.07), by Barry Unsworth

Book Description
Set in the Middle Ages during the brief yet glittering rule of the Norman kings, The Ruby in Her Navel is a tale in which the conflicts of the past portend the present. The novel opens in Palermo, in which Latin and Greek, Arab and Jew live together in precarious harmony. Thurstan Beauchamp, the Christian son of a Norman knight, works for Yusuf, a Muslim Arab, in the palace’s central finance office, a job which includes the management of blackmail and bribes, and the gathering of secret information for the king.

But the peace and prosperity of the kingdom is being threatened, internally as well as externally. Known for his loyalty but divided between the ideals of chivalry and the harsh political realities of his tumultuous times, Thurstan is dispatched to uncover the conspiracies brewing against his king. During his journeys, he encounters the woman he loved as a youth; and the renewed promise of her love, as well as the mysterious presence of an itinerant dancing girl, sends him on a spiritual odyssey that forces him to question the nature of his ambition and the folly of uncritical reverence for authority.

With the exquisite prose and masterful narrative drive that have earned him widespread acclaim, Barry Unsworth transports the reader to a distant past filled with deception and mystery, and whose racial, tribal, and religious tensions are still with us today.


Some Dream for Fools ($1.17), by Faiza Guene, translated by Jenna Johnson

Book Description
Ahlème, a young woman living on the outskirts of Paris, is trying to make a life out of the dreams she brought with her from Algeria and the reality she faces every day. Her father lost his job after an accident at his construction site. Her mother was lost to a massacre in Algeria. And her brother, Foued, boils with adolescent energy and teeters dangerously close to choosing a life of crime.

As she wanders the streets of Paris looking for work, Ahlème negotiates the disparities between her dreams and her life, her youth and her responsibilities, the expectations of those back home and the limitations of life in France.

With the same laugh-out-loud, razor-sharp humor that made Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow an international hit, Some Dream for Fools shows Faïza Guène’s evolution as a novelist and reminds us of her extraordinary talent as she explores what happens to people when a lid is put on their dreams.


Moonlight in Odessa ($3.44), by Janet Skeslien Charles

Book Description
Odessa, Ukraine, is the humor capital of the former Soviet Union, but in an upside-down world where waiters earn more than doctors and Odessans depend on the Mafia for basics like phone service and medical supplies, no one is laughing. After months of job hunting, Daria, a young engineer, finds a plum position at a foreign firm as a secretary. But every plum has a pit. In this case, it's Mr. Harmon, who makes it clear that sleeping with him is job one. Daria evades Harmon's advances by recruiting her neighbor, the slippery Olga, to be his mistress. But soon Olga sets her sights on Daria's job. Daria begins to moonlight as an interpreter at Soviet Unions(TM), a matchmaking agency that organizes "socials" where lonely American men can meet desperate Odessan women. Her grandmother wants Daria to leave Ukraine for good and pushes her to marry one of the men she meets, but Daria already has feelings for a local. She must choose between her world and America, between Vlad, a sexy, irresponsible mobster, and Tristan, a teacher nearly twice her age. Daria chooses security and America. Only it's not exactly what she thought it would be... A wry, tender, and darkly funny look at marriage, the desires we don't acknowledge, and the aftermath of communism, Moonlight in Odessa is a novel about the choices and sacrifices that people make in the pursuit of love and stability.

The Spanish Bow ($0.93), by Andromeda Romano-Lax

Book Description
I was almost born Happy.

Literally, Feliz was the Spanish name my mother wanted for me. Not a family name, not a local name, just a hope, stated in the farthest-reaching language she knew—a language that once reached around the world, to the Netherlands, Africa, the Americas, the Philippines. Only music has reached farther and penetrated more deeply.

In a dusty, turn-of-the-century Catalan village, the bequest of a cello bow sets young Feliu Delargo on the unlikely path of becoming a musician. Anarchist Barcelona and the court of the embattled monarchy in Madrid teach him his first serious lessons in creativity, principle, and passion—and their consequences. When he meets up with the charming and eccentric piano prodigy Justo Al-Cerraz, their lifelong friendship and rivalry orchestrate a tumultuous course for them both. Over the span of half a century of creative struggle and international turmoil that sees them paying house calls on Picasso one year and being courted by dictators the next, they make glorious music together, and clash over virtually everything else: love, politics, and the purpose of art. When the tensions propelling a war-torn world toward catastrophe bring Aviva, an Italian violinist with a haunted past, into their lives, Feliu and Justo embark upon their final and most dangerous collaboration.


The Saucier's Apprentice: One Long Strange Trip through the Great Cooking Schools of Europe ($1.53), by Bob Spitz

Book Description
In the blink of an eye, Bob Spitz turned fifty, finished an eight-year book project and a fourteen-year marriage, had his heart stolen and broken on the rebound, and sought salvation the only way he knew how. He fled to Europe, where he hopscotched among the finest cooking schools in pursuit of his dream.Spitz hit the fabled cooking-school circuit in a series of idyllic European villages, and The Saucier's Apprentice is a chronicle of his exploits. Combining an outrageous travelogue with gastronomic lore, hands-on cooking instruction, hot-tempered chefs, local personalities, and a batch of memorable recipes, Spitz's odyssey recounts the transformation of a professional writer (and lifelong kitchen amateur) into a world-class cook.