You don’t have to look too hard to find free fiction online these days, which is great, but it is slightly harder to find free contemporary fiction actually worth reading. So in the spirit of the holidays, here are 12 sources (because 12 seems to be the magic holiday number) for free, quality lit:
1. Featherproof Books‘ free mini-books are stories meant to be downloaded, printed out, and put together origami-style at home. Featherproof offers short stories as well as excerpts from larger works such as Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas and Amelia Gray’s AM/PM.
2. BlazeVOX is a free online journal of innovative fiction and wide-ranging fields of contemporary poetry. They also offer a catalog of “weird little ebooks,” also available for free.
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 Paul Ketchum for scoring a copy of Couch by Benjamin Parzybok.
This week, we are giving away a copy of The Ant King and Other Stories by Benjamin Rosenbaum. The Ant King and Other Stories is a dazzling, postmodern debut collection of pulp and surreal fictions: a writer of alternate histories defends his patron’s zeppelin against assassins and pirates; a woman transforms into hundreds of gumballs; an emancipated children’s collective goes house hunting. (Ed. Note: also one of my favorite books. The book is CC-licensed so you can also read the book for free online. I definitely recommend giving “The Orange” and “Other Cities” a read. Actually, you know what, just read the whole thing.) 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 Brittany for scoring a copy of Cloud & Ashes by Greer Gilman.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Couch by Benjamin Parzybok. A freak flood evicts three unlikely roommates from their apartment forcing them to get up off the couch . . . and start carrying it. The couch, though, has designs of its own and the roommates—uncertain of their own paths—follow the couch’s will as it leads them out of contemporary Portland and straight to ancient trouble. A once successful computer hacker with girl problems, Thom looks to science to explain the couch; Erik, a bumbling con man, hopes to capitalize on it; and Tree’s curious dreams make him the group’s truest believer. Parzybok creates a world in which the most domestic of objects transports the reader into magical and foreign lands. He offers a welcome antidote to the doom and gloom of the television news, cheering every adult who still hopes to discover adventure lurking in the living room. 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 James DeBruicker for scoring a copy of Hound by Vincent McCaffrey.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales by Greer Gilman. In the eighteen years since her IAFA William L. Crawford Fantasy Award–winning debut novel Moonwise, Greer Gilman’s writing has only grown more complex and entrancing. Cloud & Ashes is a slow whirlwind of language, a button box of words, a mythic Joycean fable that will invite immersion, study, revisitation, and delight. Cloud & Ashes comprises three tales: “Jack Daw’s Pack” (Nebula Award finalist), “A Crowd of Bone” (winner of the World Fantasy Award), and the new third part, a whole novel, “Unleaving.” Inventive, playful, and erudite, Gilman is an archeolexicologist rewriting language itself in these long-awaited tales. 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 Michelle Wittle who e-mailed in and picked up a copy of Crust by Lawrence Shainberg.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Hound by Vincent McCaffrey. A bookhound, Henry Sullivan buys and sells books he finds at estate auctions and library sales around Boston and often from the relatives of the recently deceased. He’s in his late thirties, single, and comfortably set in his ways. But when a woman from his past, Morgan Johnson, calls to ask him to look at her late husband’s books, he is drawn into the dark machinations of a family whose mixed loyalties and secret history will have fatal results. Hound is the first of a series of novels featuring Henry Sullivan, and the debut novel of a long-time Boston bookseller, Vincent McCaffrey. It is a paean to books, bookselling, and the transformative power of the printed word. Even as it evolves into a gripping murder mystery, it is also a reminder that there are still quiet corners of the world where the rhythms of life are calmer, where there’s still time for reading, time for getting out for a beer with friends, time to investigate the odd details of lives lived on the edges of the book world.
This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Small Beer Press. Gavin Grant and Kelly Link started Small Beer Press in 2000, after putting out a do-it-yourself zine, and working for years in independent bookstores, in order to publish the kind of books they loved handselling. Small Beer Press publishes literary fiction, innovative fantastic fiction, and classic authors whom you just may have missed the first time around. In their catalog, you’ll find first novels, collections both satisfying and surreal, critically acclaimed, award-winning writers, and exciting talents whose names you may never have heard, but whose work you’ll never be able to forget. Joan Aiken, John Crowley, Carol Emshwiller, Angelica Gorodischer, Naomi Mitchinson, and Sean Stewart are among the names on Small Beer Press’ growing list of innovators.
To enter the giveaway, leave a comment with your e-mail address in the space below, or send an email directly to contact@litdrift.com. We also recommend doing any or all of the following: Read more »
