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.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner. Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam’s “research” becomes a meditation on the possibility of the genuine in the arts and beyond: are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain as fraudulent as he fears his poems are? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader’s projections? A witness to the 2004 Madrid train bombings and their aftermath, does he participate in historic events or merely watch them pass him by? In prose that veers between the comic and tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, Leaving the Atocha Station is a portrait of the artist as a young man in an age of Google searches, pharmaceuticals, and spectacle.
James Wood of the The New Yorker called this debut novel “subtle, sinuous, and very funny.” Leaving the Atocha Station has also been praised by Paul Auster as “utterly charming” and by Deb Olin Unferth as “beautiful, funny, and revelatory” in Bookforum.
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 Shuan Duke for getting a free copy of Wire to Wire by Scott Sparling.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Bright Before Us by Katie Arnold-Ratliff. Facing the prospect of fatherhood, disillusioned by his fledgling teaching career, and mourning the loss of a former relationship, Francis Mason is a prisoner of his past mistakes. When his second-grade class discovers a dead body during a field trip to a San Francisco beach, Francis spirals into unbearable grief and all-consuming paranoia. As his behavior grows increasingly erratic, and tensions arise with the school principal and the parents of his students, he faces the familiar urge to flee—a choice that forces him to confront the character weaknesses that have shattered his life again and again, and to accept the wrenching truth about the past he’s never been able to move beyond. A haunting debut novel, Bright Before Us explores the fraught journey toward adulthood, the nature of memory, and the startling limits to which we are driven by grief.
This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Tin House Books.
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 Traviskurowski for getting a free copy of Flying Zeppelins by Joe R. Lansdale.
This week, we are giving away The Third Bear by Jeff VanderMeer. Compared by critics to Borges, Nabokov, and Kafka, inventive contemporary fantasist Jeff VanderMeer continues to amaze with this surreal, innovative, and absurdist gathering of award-winning short fiction. Exotic beasts and improbable travelers roam restlessly through these darkly diverting and finely-honed tales. Highlights include “The Situation,” in which a beleaguered office worker creates a child-swallowing manta-ray to be used for educational purposes (once described as Dilbert meets Gormenghast); “Three Days in a Border Town,” where a sharpshooter seeks the truth about her husband in an elusive floating City beyond a far-future horizon; “Errata,” following an oddly-familiar writer who has marshaled a penguin, a shaman, and two pearl-handled pistols with which to plot the end of the world. Also included are two stories original to this collection, including “The Quickening,” in which a lonely child is torn between familial obligation and a wounded talking rabbit. Chimerical and hypnotic, VanderMeer leads readers through the postmodern into a new literature of the imagination.
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 epynephrin for getting a free copy of Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.
This week, we are giving away Flaming Zeppelins by Joe R. Lansdale. What do the disembodied head of Buffalo Bill Cody, Annie Oakley, Frankenstein, the Tin Man, Captain Nemo, the Flying Dutchman, and the inestimable Ned the Seal, have in common? Find out as they embark upon a spectacular set of non-stop Steampunk adventures. For the first time, two epic chronicles, Zeppelins West and Flaming London, inscribed by a courageous young seal on his trusty notepad, are collected together in one volume. So leap from a flaming zeppelin with the stars of the Wild West Show in a desperate escape from an imperial Japanese enclave. Wash up upon the island of Doctor Moreau, in mortal danger from his unnatural experiments (ignorant that Dracula approaches by sea). Unite with Jules Verne, Passpartout, and Mark Twain on a desperate voyage to the burning streets of London, which are infested with killer squid from outer space courtesy of H. G. Wells’ time machine. It’s a raucous steam-powered locomotive of shoot-’em-up westerns, dime novels, comic books, and pulp fiction, as only Lansdale, the high-priest of Texan weirdness, could tell.
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 Hansenl1 for getting a free copy of Prayer and Parable: Stories by Paul Maliszewski.
This week, we are giving away Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Enter the Scintillating Clockpunk Gear-o-Torium: Herein dwell the breathless adventures that you secretly seek. Gaze upon the rebellious Mecha-Ostrich, the seductive Steam Dancer, the intrepid Mssrs. Balfour & Meriwether, and the hithertofore undefeated Cast-Iron Kid. Experience the Delights of the Chrononaut Odditorium: An esteemed panel of self-appointed experts, under pain of ridicule, will reveal Top Secret Historical Enticements. Be dazzled by the first English translation of the quintessential Steampunk story: “Flying Fish Prometheus” by Vilhelm Bergsoe. It’s Steampunk – and it’s Reloaded.
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 Harrod for getting a free copy of When Fenelon Falls by Dorothy Ellen Palmer.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Prayer and Parable: Stories by Paul Maliszewski. At a campground, a divorced father confronts a man he believes hurt his daughter. A devoted student traces a winding path through the snow, searching for the next most beautiful thing. Two brothers watch their father tinker lovingly with his homemade robots. In Paul Maliszewski’s debut story collection, men and women struggle to do right. They argue. They think. They think again. They have odd dreams. Often they fail at being good, and yet, on occasion, they realize moments of true kindness. In language that is at once simple and supple, plain-spoken and arresting, these twenty-eight stories describe complete lives in sharp detail, lives we may recognize as not unlike our own.
This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Fence Books.
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 Rubydog for getting a free copy of Monocerous by Suzette Mayr.
This week, we are giving away a copy of When Fenelon Falls by Dorothy Ellen Palmer. A spaceship hurtles towards the moon, hippies gather at Woodstock, Charles Manson leads a cult into murder and a Kennedy drives off a Chappaquiddick dock: it’s the summer of 1969. And as mankind takes its giant leap, Jordan May March, disabled bastard and genius, age fourteen, limps and schemes her way towards adulthood. Trapped at the March family’s cottage, she spends her days memorizing Top 40 lists, avoiding her adoptive cousins, catching frogs and plotting to save Yogi, the bullied, butter tart-eating bear caged at the top of March Road. In her diary, reworking the scant facts of her adoption, Jordan visions and revisions a hundred different scenarios for her conception on that night in 1954 when Hurricane Hazel tore Toronto to shreds, imagining her conception at the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital or the CNE horse palace, and such parents as JFK, Louisa May Alcott, Perry Mason and the Queen of England. But when bear-baiting cousin Derwood finds the diary and learns everything that the family will not face, the target of his torture shifts from Yogi the Bear to his disabled and haunted adopted cousin. As caged as Yogi, Jordan is drawn to desperate measures. With its soundtrack of sixties pop songs, swamp creatures, motor boats and the rapid-fire punning of the family’s Marchspeak, When Fenelon Falls will take you to a time and place that was never as idyllic as it seemed, where not belonging turns the Summer of Love into a summer of loss.
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 Jessica M. for getting a free copy of The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn by Sean Dixon.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Monocerous by Suzette Mayr. A seventeen-year-old boy, bullied and heartbroken, hangs himself. And although he felt terribly alone, his suicide changes everyone around him. His parents are devastated. His secret boyfriend’s girlfriend is relieved. His unicorn- and virginity-obsessed classmate, Faraday, is shattered; she wishes she had made friends with him that time she sold him an Iced Cappuccino at Tim Hortons. His English teacher, mid-divorce and mid-menopause, wishes she could remember the dead student’s name, that she could care more about her students than her ex’s new girlfriend. Who happens to be her cousin. The school guidance counsellor, Walter, feels guilty – maybe he should have made an effort when the kid asked for help. Max, the principal, is worried about how it will reflect on the very Catholic school. And Walter, who’s been secretly in a relationship with Max for years, thinks that’s a little callous. He’s also tired of Max’s obsession with some sci-fi show on tv. And Max wishes Walter would lose some weight and remember to use a coaster. And then Max meets a drag queen named Crêpe Suzette. And everything changes. Monoceros is a masterpiece of the tragicomic; by exploring the effects of a suicide on characters outside the immediate circle, Mayr offers a dazzlingly original look at the ripple effects – both poignant and funny – of a tragedy. A tender, bold work.
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 TNBBC for getting a free copy of All My Friends Are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman.
This week, we are giving away a copy of The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn by Sean Dixon. It all started with a black rose and a rich young man. And a house with a creek running through it. And then there she was, Kip Flynn, standing beside her dead boyfriend and agreeing to take a large sum of money from the young man’s father to keep quiet. As if she could have done anything else, being so scared and grief-stricken and maybe pregnant. But that’s not the end of it. You see, there’s some kind of connection between Kip and this rich developer’s son that keeps them tight in one another’s orbit. So, when Kip awakens from her grief, intent on revenge, they find themselves pursuing one another with a ferocity they can barely understand, one that spirals outward, with subway accidents and arson and drainpipes and backhoe wars, to envelop roommates, two guilty fathers, a window-cleaner or two, landlords, family secrets, Vietnamese gangsters, a standup-bass player and an activist tour guide. And concluding in the subterranean heart of Toronto itself, which, like Kip, is torn between vengefulness and growth.
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 Timothy Gager for getting a free copy of alt.punk by Lavinia Ludlow.
This week, we are giving away a copy of All My Friends Are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman. All Tom’s friends really are superheroes. There’s the Ear, the Spooner, the Impossible Man. Tom even married a superhero, the Perfectionist. But at their wedding, the Perfectionist was hypnotized (by ex-boyfriend Hypno, of course) to believe that Tom is invisible. Nothing he does can make her see him. Six months later, she’s sure that Tom has abandoned her. So she’s moving to Vancouver. She’ll use her superpower to make Vancouver perfect and leave all the heartbreak in Toronto. With no idea Tom’s beside her, she boards an airplane in Toronto. Tom has until the wheels touch the ground in Vancouver to convince her he’s visible, or he loses her forever. Read an interview with the author about the book here.
This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Coffee House Press.
