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 Mary Ann for getting free copies of The Word of God and The Wall of America by Thomas M. Disch.

This week, we are giving away THREE books (holy crap!) thanks to the good folks over at Tachyon Publications. They are: Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, and The Secret History of Science Fiction, all edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel.

In Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, sixteen extreme stories reveal a government ninja routed by a bicycle repairman, the inventor of digitized paper hijacked by his college crush, a dead boy trapped in a warped storybook paradise, and the Queen of England attacked with the deadliest of forbidden technology: a working modem. You’ll meet Manfred Macx, renegade meme-broker, Red Sonja, virtual reality sex-goddess, and Felix, humble sysadmin and post-apocalyptic hero. Editors James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel have united cyberpunk visionaries William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Pat Cadigan with the new post-cyberpunk vanguard including Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross, and Jonathan Lethem. Including a canon-establishing introduction and excerpts from a hotly-contested online debate, Rewired is the first anthology to define and capture the crackling excitement of the post-cyberpunks.

If it is true that the test of a first-rate mind is its ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time, then we live in a century when it takes a first-rate mind just to get through the day. We have unprecedented access to information; cognitive dissonance is a banner headline in our morning papers and radiates silently from our computer screens. Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, poised between literature and popular culture, embraces the dissonance. These ambitious stories of visionary strangeness defy the conventions of science fiction. Tales by Michael Chabon, Karen Joy Fowler, Jonathan Lethem, Carol Emshwiller, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, George Saunders, and others pull the reader into a vivid dreamspace and embrace the knowledge that life today is increasingly surreal.

Exploring an alternate history of science fiction, The Secret History of Science Fiction showcases eighteen brilliant authors leading the way to a new literature of the future. These award-winning stories defy trends, cross genres, and prove great fiction cannot be categorized. Two strangely-detached astronauts orbit Earth while a third world war rages on. A primatologist’s lover suspects her of obsession with one of her simian charges. The horrors of trench warfare dovetail with the theoretical workings of black holes. A dissolving marriage and bitter custody dispute are overshadowed by the arrival of time travelers. An astonishing invention that records the sense of touch is far too dangerous for Thomas Edison to reveal. The Secret History of Science Fiction includes stories by Margaret Atwood, T. C. Boyle, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Lethem, and George Saunders. Read more »

Open letters to punctuation marks.

Ships that pass is a Tumblr of “fake, imagined, and literary missed connections posted to Craigslist and then re-posted here with real and actual responses to fake, imagined, and literary missed connections.”

Alex Epstein’s 3 micro stories over at The Outlet are worth a read.

“This is Just to Say That I’m Tired of Sharing an Apartment With William Carlos Williams.”

An interesting note on who reads bestsellers from The Rumpus:

“A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.”

The Nervous Breakdown talks experimental fiction.

Aaaand because this is so SCRUMPTIOUS that I have no choice but to share, here is…Jane Austen’s Fight Club: Read more »

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 MRG for getting a free copy of The Cat’s Pajamas and Other Stories by James Morrow.

This week, we are giving away copies of the books The Word of God and The Wall of America by Thomas M. Disch.

The Word of God is the only tome ever written by God Himself! In this compelling memoir, the first and hopefully the last of its kind, America’s most divine author reveals the intimate and shocking details of His sudden elevation to the most coveted and least understood position in the universe. In early 2005 (A.D.), wearying of the world’s religious schisms, doctrinal heresies, and manifold editorial sins, Thomas M. Disch took matters into His Own hands and became the Deity. As controversial as it is incontrovertible, the moving true story of His awful transformation and its awesome aftermath reveals, at long last, the hidden web that links Disch, Philip K. Dick, Western wear, the Leamington Hotel, and Eternity itself. Read it in fear and trembling. But read it, or else.

Following the breakout novel, The Word of God, the surreal, satiric stories in The Wall of America pay a mesmerizing visit to the shadowy zone that lies between everyday life as we now know it and a perilous near future that is frighteningly tangible. In “The Wall of America,” the Department of Homeland Security has put up a border wall between the U.S. and Canada. But the NEA has plans for the wall as well, turning it into the world’s largest art gallery. After the Rapture, working-class life for “A Family of the Post-Apocalypse” is not as different as one might imagine, despite the occasional plague of biker-gang locusts, Between addiction and art is “Ringtime,” where a criminal is trapped in a recursive compulsion to visit other people’s memories while he is forced to record his own for an eager audience. A Somali schoolgirl living in post-WWIII Minneapolis goes on a bloody crusade to rid her town of a familiar predator, one who might just be a monster, in “White Man.” Vivid, starkly imagined, and strikingly articulate, this disquieting collection is a journey that skillfully straddles the line between playful absurdity and pointed irony.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Tachyon Publications. Read more »

Every time his Photoshop crashes, filmmaker/developer Garrett Murray emails an original (and bitter) piece of flash fiction to the company instead of a crash report, spawning a genre which Mediabistro has dubbed “crash report fiction.”

The Great Gatsby: classic novel and video game. I’m embarrassed to say I’m geeking out about this:

Join Nick Carraway as you explore the mansions and bungalows of Long Island, the parlors of New York City, and the heart and soul of the Roaring Twenties. Attend extravagant parties and lush gatherings as you dance the Charleston with a happy couple harboring scintillating secrets. Sip bootleg gin with a mysterious millionaire desperate to bring the passions of the past into the present in Great Gatsby, a fun Hidden Object game.

And following on the subject of not letting books be just books: here are eight classic works of literature that “deserve” a graphic novel treatment.

Can fart jokes save the future of reading?

A report on the “Vonnegut effect.”

File this under “wha?” and “gross”: a $75,000 book made from blood.

The real people behind famous fictional characters, including Sethe from Beloved, Ulysses’ Molly Bloom, and To Kill a Mockingbird’s Dill.

Aaaand to get you through the rest of the week, here is the Old Spice Guy (or someone who looks a lot like him, anyway) promoting libraries: Read more »

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 winners Scott and Terri for getting a free copies of Walking Man by Tim W. Brown.

This week, we are giving away a copy of the book The Cat’s Pajamas and Other Stories by James Morrow. An integrity gene is harvested from the brain of an unwilling schoolteacher. Christopher Columbus lands in modern day Manhattan. John Wayne seeks treatment from a cinematic oncologist. Sports fans save the universe every day. The Cat’s Pajamas is a provocative collection of satiric short fiction from Nebula and World Fantasy award winning author James Morrow. Included is Auspicious Eggs, in which ritual procreation and compulsory abortion are mandated by the Catholic Church. Two original pieces were written specifically for The Cat’s Pajamas: the play, Come Back, Dr. Sarcophagus, and the short story, Fucking Justice.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Tachyon Publications. Read more »

Janet Fitch’s 10 (useful) tips for writers.

HTMLGIANT on how to make your next reading more interesting (even if your work really isn’t).

At long last, you can now take a quiz to determine which type of dystopian future is right for you.

One-hit (literary) wonders.

Which famous writer do you write like? Apparently I write like James Joyce, and I’ve decided to tell myself this is actually true.

Aaaand just for kicks, here’s a periodic table of swearing: Read more »

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 winners Claudia and Ben for getting a free copies of The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores by Corey Mesler.

This week, we are giving away TWO copies of the book Walking Man by Tim W. Brown. From the same metafictional universe as the films Best in Show and This is Spinal Tap, Walking Man documents the life and times of Brian Walker, publisher of the zine Walking Man. Through a fateful encounter between his foot and a yuppie’s BMW, Brian becomes the most famous zine publisher in America and an ardent defender of pedestrian rights. Meanwhile, he must juggle the ambitions of his sexy actress girlfriend with his own soaring celebrity. Written in the tradition of the scandalous tell-all biography, Walking Man satirizes so-called “alternative” culture while it fondly recollects the 80s and 90s zine scene.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Bronx River Press.  Read more »

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 Melanie for getting a free copies of the chapbooks The Drunk Sonnets by Daniel Bailey and We Were Eternal and Gigantic by Evelyn Hampton.

This week, we are giving away TWO copies of the book The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores by Corey Mesler. The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores is set in the fictional Queneau, Arkansas. Restaurant reviewer Tom More is living the good life, small-town style. He is a cad, a rural Romeo. But his sense of self is abruptly shaken when another man with the same name moves into town. Meanwhile, as the residents of this countrified Peyton Place are lustily carrying on, there is another darker energy at work. Somebody is bumping off the male inhabitants of Queneau. Someone, it would seem, is on a self-appointed mission of extermination. The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores is dark comedy at its most outrageous–imagine a three-way between Carson McCullers, Henry Miller and Peter DeVries.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Bronx River Press.  Read more »

The smallest literary magazine ever? Matchbook Story is a lit mag published inside, you guessed it, a book of matches, with only enough room for a 300-character story.

The longest novels of all time, summarized in 140 characters or less.

Can poetry deter kleptomaniacs?

If you’re a writer, avoid these professions for your day job.

Unexpected literary references in “Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” “The Simpsons,” “South Park,” “Looney Tunes,” and other animated TV shows, via.

You’re never too old to start writing. Case in point: an 82-year-old woman has just landed a 3-book deal this week. Take that, infamous “20 under 40″ list.

Here are some stories The Rumpus’s Seth Fischer likes. I like them too.

Image: Bruce Willey.

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 DWW for getting a free copies of the chapbooks Typewriter by Jimmy Chen and Less Shiny by Mary Miller.

This week, we are giving away TWO books: The Drunk Sonnets by Daniel Bailey and We Were Eternal and Gigantic by Evelyn Hampton. The Drunk Sonnets full-length book of poems by Daniel Bailey.  From forgiveness in a beehive to tiny banquets for retired janitors, Bailey’s celebrated sonnet sequence arrives in a perfectbound volume that you can carry and eat and hold against your heart when your heart catches a shake. Bailey’s work has appeared in No Colony, Abraham Lincoln, NOÖ Journal, elimae, Opium Magazine and more. We Were Eternal and Gigantic is a collection of prose and poetry from Evelyn Hampton, the editor of Dewclaw. We Were Eternal and Gigantic asks: What do you do when there’s a shape in you the size of your body? When some haircuts are wolverine kits and some cling to bulwarks? When you want to be more sincere but the economy says NO / EAT MORE? Doesn’t husband sound like has-been? Maybe you are in love with the one who took a sun fish from your mom’s aquarium. Maybe in America, the male lead has lost his really great mustard-colored slacks. Remember: when the world is too much with you, the world can can still look white from the air.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Magic Helicopter Press. Read more »