Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Hannah B. for getting a free copy of The American Girl by Monika Fagerholm.
This week, we are giving away a copy of The Beijing of Possibilties by Jonathan Tel. Blending elements of the surreal with carefully observed details of life in present-day Beijing, Jonathan Tel’s short stories offer a rich and highly entertaining guide to the city and its many and varied inhabitants–from a modern-day Monkey King to an equally contemporary indentured servant, from a boy tasting his first cotton candy to a Ming Dynasty princess posting her first online profile. The stories offer a vicarious tour through modern Beijing and a long view of Chinese history. The reader flies through the book, chuckling over one character’s trickery, moved by another’s plight, and horrified at another’s unwitting actions, until reaching the culminating novella, which brings the whole book and its take on China back to the Western reader with a stunning immediacy. Americans’ newly minted fascination with China, stoked by the 2008 Olympics, can find both intellectual and artistic satisfaction in this collection. You can read an excerpt here.
This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Other Press.
Other Press attracts authors who are guided by a passion to discover the limits of knowledge and imagination. They publish novels, short stories, poetry, and essays from America and around the world that represent literature at its best. Their nonfiction books–should they be history, current events, popular culture or memoir–explore how psychic, cultural, historical, and literary shifts inform our vision of the world and of each other.
To enter the giveaway, all you have to do is comment in the space below. Make sure to tell us your email address so we can contact you if you win! We also recommend doing the following:
- Becoming Other Press’ friend on Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace
- Checking out Other Press’ videos on Youtube
- Becoming our friend on Twitter & Facebook
- Signing up for our newsletter
- Writing a one-sentence story about Friday
Winner will be chosen randomly at 12pm on Friday, May 7 and notified via email. The winner must respond to our email within 48 hours, or a new winner will be randomly selected.
Good luck!
EDIT: Giveaway now closed. Congrats to this week’s winner JABRAILLE. Try your luck again in the new Free Book Friday with Nino Ricci’s The Origin of Species.
