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 Gillian for getting a free copy of They Is Us by Tama Janowitz.

This week, we are giving away a copy of Attention. Deficit. Disorder. by Brad Listi, the first great road novel of the 21st century and an impressive debut from a major new voice in American fiction. Days after his ex-girlfriend’s suicide, Wayne flies to San Francisco for her funeral. When he learns that she aborted their child, Wayne embarks upon a search for meaning that takes him to unusual places and through some of the most influential events of the past ten years. His journey takes him up and down the East Coast on foot, then over to Cuba where he meets the fishing guide who inspired Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, across the American West in an RV, ending up at the legendary Burning Man festival and an encounter with his soulmate, who turns out to be a six foot three giant of a woman in a purple cowboy hat. Brad Listi’s novel is a dazzling exploration of love and death that just so happens to include some drugs, prostitutes, naked cycling, Mantovani and the ingredients for a Molotov cocktail. It is one of the most inventive and rewarding debuts in years.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by The Friday Project. 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 Penny for getting a free copy of Black Boxes by Caroline Smailes.

This week, we are giving away a copy of They Is Us by Tama Janowitz. Oryx & Crake meets Douglas Coupland. An unforgettable vision of the future of America. Years from now America finds itself split between the rich and the poor. The haves live in luxury within the small regions that remain unpolluted while the have-nots inhabit a toxic suburbia full of terrorism, crime and genetic mutations. Perhaps not all that different from today then? They Is Us tells the story of one family from the poor side as they go about their daily lives. Julie has a job as a summer intern at an animal laboratory. She can’t resist taking home the discarded mutants and her house is filled with genetic cast offs. Her mother, Murielle, has kicked out her stepfather and now, seemingly from nowhere, finds herself subject to the attentions of multi-millionaire businessman A.J.M. Bishrop. Set against a backdrop of increasingly invasive technology, growing pollution and the President of the USA’s impending gay marriage (to be broadcast live across the nation) They Is Us features a cast of unforgettable characters that will stick in your mind long after you finish the book.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by The Friday Project. 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 Kerry for getting a free copy of Survival By Storytelling Issue One from SBS Magazine.

This week, we are giving away a copy of Black Boxes by Caroline Smailes. Julie Myerson meets Ian McEwan in this gripping novel of family breakdown. Ana Lewis is trapped by her own expectations. Her intense relationship with fellow student Alex begins to crack beyond repair when she becomes pregnant, and his subsequent withdrawal, emotionally and sexually are hard for Ana to bear. Eventually, following the birth of Pip and then Davie, Alex leaves Ana to a life of question and blame. Locked in her room for much of the time she woefully neglects her children, preferring instead to replay scenes from her life over and over, fighting the urge to blink for fear it should dissipate the memories. Told within the context of two black boxes, one Ana’s and one Pip’s, the story reveals the key factors that have contributed to this catastrophic breakdown of life.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by The Friday Project. 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 Mel Bosworth for getting a free copy of Hot Springs by Geoffrey Becker.

This week, we are giving away a copy of Survival By Storytelling Issue One from SBS Magazine. Included in this volume are twelve short stories, seven poems, and one article, all by authors under the age of twenty-five. In addition, authors Paul Genesse (The Golden Cord and The Dragon Hunters) and T. M. Hunter (Heroes Die Young) have contributed two articles on the publishing industry and writing. From vampires struggling with identity to guilty lovers trying to raise the dead to humorous and dark tales of life, the first issue of Survival By Storytelling is sure to tingle the senses and remind us all that age has nothing to do with a good story.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by SBS Magazine. 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 Andy for getting a free copy of The Children’s Day by Michiel Heyns.

This week, we are giving away a copy of Hot Springs by Geoffrey Becker. Vibrant, sexy, and quite possibly crazy, Bernice is determined to reclaim the child she gave up for adoption five years ago. She convinces her boyfriend, Landis, to help carry out her plan, but once the abduction is accomplished, Bernice—whose own mother was given to manic episodes and strange behavior—is plagued with doubts. Will Landis stay with her, given her volatile personality and his own drifter past? Will she and Landis both end up in jail for this crime? And, perhaps most importantly, will she fail at being a mother? Dovetailed with this is the story of the conservative Christian adoptive parents, Tessa and David, and the effect the kidnapping has on their troubled marriage. As Bernice and Landis journey across America, from Colorado Springs to Tucson to Baltimore, Bernice must confront her past and the secrets she has kept.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Tin House Books. 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 Margaret for getting a free copy of Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia.

This week, we are giving away a copy of The Children’s Day by Michiel Heyns. This unforgettable first novel evokes a young South African boy’s rite of passage in the 1960s. In a deceptively simple narrative, Simon observes a series of newcomers to his small home town and gradually pieces together truths about love, life, politics and sex: realizations which crystallize as a result of a disturbing encounter at the novel’s climax. The confusions of adolescence and the absurdities of South African politics are keenly observed, as Simon struggles to define the world and understand adult certainties – only to discover the dark ambiguities at the center of so much in life.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Tin House Books. 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 Gabe for getting a free copy of Erased by Jim Krusoe.

This week, we are giving away a copy of Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia, edited by Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker. Few countries have undergone more radical transformations than Russia has since the fall of the Soviet Union. The stories in Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia present twenty-two depictions of the new Russia from its most talented young writers. Selected from the pages of the top Russian literary magazines and written by winners of the most prestigious literary awards, most of these stories appear here in English for the first time. Translators include Nick Allen, Keith Gessen, Anna Gunin, Ellen Litman, and others. The work in this anthology reminds us that Russia’s greatest commodity and its greatest contribution to the world has not been oil and gas and armaments. Rather, it’s been the successive generations of Russian writers capable of examining life in all its emotional and intellectual restlessness, in all its complexity and intensity.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Tin House Books.  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 Traci for getting a free copy of From Away by David Carkeet.

This week, we are giving away a copy of Erased by Jim Krusoe. In Erased, Theodore Bellefontaine, the owner of a mail-order gardening-implement business, receives a postcard from his dead mother. “I need to see you,” the first card reads. At first, Theodore does what any sensible person would: he ignores it. But when he gets a second, even more urgent card, Theodore leaves his quiet home in St. Nils for a radiantly imagined Cleveland, Ohio, to track down his mother. Aided by Uleene, the last remaining member of Satan’s Samaritans, an all-girl bikers club, he searches for clues within the worlds of women’s clubs, art, rodent extermination, and sport fishing. Abandonment, life, death, and, oddly, Cleveland are explored in the hilarious second installment of Jim Krusoe’s trilogy about resurrection.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Tin House Books.  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 Peter Richter for getting a free copy of The Man with Two Arms by Billy Lombardo.

This week, we are giving away a copy of From Away by David Carkeet. David Carkeet’s previous novels have been covered in glory by critics and gained him a loyal following, but in From Away he has created a masterpiece—a brilliant comic novel that is also a finely wrought mystery. Denny Braintree, a wisecracking loner devoted to model trains, finds himself stranded in late-winter Vermont. His night at the hotel begins with promise, but then his prospective one-night stand walks out on him. Leaving town, Denny is mistaken for lookalike Homer Dumpling, a popular native son who mysteriously disappeared from town three years earlier. Instead of correcting the mistake, Denny dons his new identity as easily as a Vermonter’s winter fleece, and a good thing too—the woman he had hoped to sleep with has turned up dead, and Denny is the chief suspect. As Denny tries to unravel the mystery, he struggles to hide his true identity from Homer’s increasingly suspicious circle of family and friends, including Homer’s prickly girlfriend. In Denny, Carkeet has crafted a fast-talking bumbler whose instinct for survival will face the ultimate challenge, with readers cheering him on all the way.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by The Overlook 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 jspad for getting a free copy of The Alchemaster’s Apprentice by Walter Moers.

This week, we are giving away a copy of The Man with Two Arms by Billy Lombardo. Baseball fanatic Henry Granville spends hours introducing his son Denny to balls of all sizes and shapes. He turns his basement into an indoor stadium and guides Denny’s behavior, ensuring that each action performed on one side is matched by an equal action on the other, from throwing a ball and swinging a bat to coloring and wiping his bum. Soon Denny can throw perfectly with either arm, a feat virtually unheard of in baseball. He skyrockets into the major leagues, breaking records held for decades. But when a journalist hungry for a scoop exaggerates Henry’s obsession and exposes him as a monster, the pressures of media and celebrity threaten to destroy the world that father and son have created. A baseball novel and much more, The Man with Two Arms explores the ways in which we protect, betray, love, and shape each other as we attempt to find our way through life.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by The Overlook Press. Read more »