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 DT for getting a free copy of One Story Issue #137, “The Puppet” by Reif Larsen.

This week, we are giving away a copy of Attempts at a Life by Danielle Dutton. “An important new literary voice” crafting “expert, miniscule language slips that make us slide down the surface of her narratives like raindrops” (Rain Taxi), Danielle Dutton operates somewhere between fiction and poetry, biography and theory, creating worlds of possibility, worlds filled with surprises, constantly pushing out towards something new. In “S&M,” a marriage suffers from the words you were always missing: sky, loft, music, dogs, pipes, puppets, war. In “Mary Carmichael,” a woman with a pair of scissors and the need to cut out her insatiable desire slices a veiled hat from a fern in a pot and a river out of a postbox. In stories that find movement wherever they turn, in every phrase and cadence, each sentence a small explosion of images and anthems and odd juxtapositions—”alluring puzzles where the pool is overflowing and emptying at the same time” (Robert Glück)—Danielle Dutton “writes with a deft explosiveness that craters the page with stunning, unsettling precision” (Laird Hunt). Attempts at a Life is “serious, but as many dramatists celebrate: comedy orbits a dark sun. Which is to say, this is also a very funny book” (Selah Saterstrom, American Book Review).

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Tarpaulin Sky 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 Kaylah for getting a free copy of Steampunk, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.

This week, we are giving away issue #137 of One Story, “The Puppet” by Reif Larsen. Check out an excerpt:

When Valise first checked in to the Holiday Inn, the lovely receptionist in the oversized sweater gave him the key to his room and said very kindly, “Please, M. Retour, if you will avoid windows at all times. Or else sniper will shoot you dead and…” She sighed and parted her hands to indicate the predicament they were all in. Valise stared, struck by the restrained elegance of this gesture, the hovering kiss of palms into a weary bloom of fingertips. The air in the lobby was damp and sour; he could smell the faint paw-back stink of cordite entwining with the scent of the single, despondent lily in the vase on her desk. Suddenly, he was overcome with the electric, almost toxic, sensation that he had already experienced this precise pairing of pantomimed resignation with the lingering scents of damage and inflorescence. He had never been to Sarajevo before, of course, nor had he ever met this woman, but the sense of déjà-vu was so violent and true that Valise shivered, and without thinking, tapped the call bell in front of him.

Ding!

“Yes?” the woman said, blinking. This, too had happened before.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by One Story. 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 Rachel for getting free copies of The Dog Said Bow-Wow and Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures by Michael Swanwick.

This week, we are giving away Steampunk, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Steampunk is Victorian elegance and modern technology: steam-driven robots, souped-up stagecoaches, and space-faring dirigibles fueled by gaslight romance, mad scientists, and oh-so-trim waistcoats. It’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Wizard of Oz, and The Golden Compass. Replete with whimsical mechanical wonders and bold adventurers, this riveting anthology lovingly collects classic steampunk stories, pop-culture fueled discussions of steampunk, and essential recommended reading lists for the discerning steampunk fan.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Tachyon Publications. 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 ARP for getting free copies of Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, and The Secret History of Science Fiction, edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel.

This week, we are giving away The Dog Said Bow-Wow and Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures by Michael Swanwick.

In The Dog Said Bow-Wow, great literature has never been this much fun before. The reigning master of short fiction reinvents science fiction and fantasy in a dazzling new collection unlike anything you’ve ever read. Time-traveling dinosaurs wreak havoc on a placid Vermont town. An ogre is murdered in a locked room in Faerie. An uncanny bordello proves as dangerous as it is alluring. Language is stolen from the builders of Babel. Those strangely loveable Post-Utopian scoundrels and con men, Darger and Surplus, swindle their way through London, Paris, and Arcadia. The Dog Said Bow-Wow includes three Hugo Award-winning stories and an original novelette of swashbuckling romance and adventure, “The Skysailor’s Tale.” Ranging from the hardest of science fiction to the highest of fantasy, this irresistible collection amuses and enlightens as only Michael Swanwick can.

Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures is a work of masterfully-sustained whimsy for adults unlike anything you’ve ever read. Cigar-Box Faust contains over seventy stories in fewer than a hundred pages. Often humorous, sometimes chilling, always entertaining, these are the works that have resurrected a moribund literary form and made it live and breathe again. The title piece is a five-minute condensation of a classic of Western literature, featuring a cigar-cutter as Mephistopheles, a box of matches in the roles of Helen of Troy, an Angel of the Lord, the Light of Ontology, and a cigar as Faust himself. Though it has previously been performed live by the author, this is its first appearance in print. There is also an abecedary showcasing Swanwick’s bravura imagination with a separate story for every letter of the alphabet, another set of tales for every planet in the Solar system, and a series of pieces that the author literally wrote in his sleep! To say nothing of a clutch of alternate autobiographies, a novella of decadence and corporate politics in a future Venice that has been boiled down to 416 words, Picasso and Philip K. Dick as existential heroes … and a rhyme for “orange.”

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

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »