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Virgin Elizabeth by Robin Maxwel from HarperCollins is $1.99

Book Description:

“An intriguing slice of Elizabethan history.” — Publishers Weekly

A book of passion, of sixteenth-century England, of greed and political ambition unto death. Historians and novelists have written extensively about the various aspects of Queen Elizabeth I’s long, rich, and tumultuous life. No one has ever given us a fully realized portrait of the greatest English monarch as a young girl. Concluding her brilliant Tudor trilogy, Robin Maxwell enters this new territory by introducing Elizabeth as a romantic and vulnerable teenager dangerously awakening to sexuality with the wrong man. Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, was banished from the court at the age of two when her father sent Anne Boleyn to her death. Seven years later, when the gracious and immensely wealthy Catherine Parr became Henry’s sixth wife, she softened the King’s heart and Elizabeth was readmitted to the court. For the next four years the young princess enjoyed a warm friendship with Catherine and a new sense of belonging.

In 1547, Great Harry is dead, and Elizabeth’s nine-year-old brother Edward VI is king in name only. Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, has boldly named himself Lord Protector and effectively seized power. Meanwhile the duke’s equally ambitious brother Thomas, realizing he cannot wrest control directly, has deployed his greatest talent—his charm and sexual magnetism—to utmost effect by persuading Henry’s widow Catherine to marry him. His real goal, however, is the late king’s daughter: Elizabeth herself. And so the game begins, one with rules that only reckless, amoral Thomas Seymour understands. Into this intrigue are drawn both those who love Elizabeth and those who wish her ill. In order to escape certain doom and achieve independence, Elizabeth must stand alone.

Waiting by Debra Ginsberg from HarperCollins is $2.99

Book Description:

A veteran waitress dishes up a spicy and robust account of life as it really exists behind kitchen doors.

Part memoir, part social commentary, part guide to how to behave when dining out, Debra Ginsberg’s book takes readers on her twentyyear journey as a waitress at a soap-operatic Italian restaurant, an exclusive five-star dining club, the dingiest of diners, and more. While chronicling her evolution as a writer, Ginsberg takes a behind-the-scenes look at restaurant life-revealing that yes, when pushed, a server will spit in food, and, no, that’s not really decaf you’re getting-and how most people in this business are in a constant state of waiting to do something else.

Fringe-ology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable-And Couldn’t by Steve Volk from HarperCollins is $1.99

Book Description:

“A sharply written, intelligently argued book that should appeal equally to believers and skeptics.” (Booklist)

Paranormal claims don’t traditionally sit well with reporters, but journalist Steve Volk decided to focus his tenacity on a new beat: a NASA astronaut-turned-mystic, a world-famous psychologist who taught us about dying and decided death may not exist at all, and scientists attempting to verify what mystics have been reporting for millennia. From his journey into the bizarre, Volk discovers that the “fringe” story strikes at the core of what it means to be human.

Knight of Darkness (Lords of Avalon) by Kinley MacGregor from HarperCollins is $0.99

Book Description:

For countless centuries, I’ve been the assassin for the infamous Merlin, even though the woman who birthed me sits at the right hand of our enemy, Morgen le Fey. Now both my mother and Morgen have decided that it’s time I take my place on their side of this conflict.

Normally, telling them no wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact that the good guys I protect think that I’m an even worse demon than the ones we fight. Hmm, maybe they’re right. I have to say that I do enjoy maiming anyone who gets in my way.

At least until my mother gives me a simple choice: join Morgen’s Circle of the Damned or see an innocent woman die. I’m all for saving the innocent, but Merewyn isn’t as innocent as she seems. And she’s none too fond of the fact that her fate is in my dubious hands. Personally I’m all for taking the easy way out, but leaving her to Morgen is rough, even for me. Now the only way to save both our lives is to face the evilest forces ever known—my mother and Morgen. And two people who know nothing of trust must learn to rely on each other or die: provided we don’t kill each other first.

Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful by Amy Stewart from Algonquin Books is $1.99

Book Description:

Award-winning author Amy Stewart takes readers on an around-the-world, behind-the-scenes look at the flower industry and how it has sought — for better or worse — to achieve perfection. She tracks down the hybridizers, geneticists, farmers, and florists working to invent, manufacture, and sell flowers that are bigger, brighter, and sturdier than anything nature can provide.

There’s a scientist intent on developing the first genetically modified blue rose; an eccentric horitcultural legend who created the most popular lily; a breeder of gerberas of every color imaginable; and an Ecuadorean farmer growing exquisite roses, the floral equivalent of a Tiffany diamond. And, at every turn she discovers the startling intersection of nature and technology, of sentiment and commerce.

Boone: A Biography (Shannon Ravenel Books) by Robert Morgan from Algonquin Books is $1.99

Book Description:

This commanding biography from New York Times bestselling author Robert Morgan transforms a mythic American hero—a legend in his own time—into a flesh-and-blood man.Morgan’s sweeping biography of Daniel Boone is the story of America—its ideals, its promise, its romance, and its destiny. It is the most comprehensive book ever written about the man who was the largest spirit of his time. Hunter, explorer, settler, he was a trailblazer and a revolutionary—an American icon for more than two hundred years.

Born in 1734, Boone participated in the colonization of North America, the settling of the Middle Plain, the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary War, the election of his friend as the first president of the United States, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Westward Expansion. Unlike others of his time, he had a reverence for the Indians, who taught him how to hunt, navigate, and survive in the impenetrable wilderness. He accomplished feat after impossible feat yet was also accused of treason, fraud, hypocrisy; was court-martialed; and was sued for debt again and again. By the end of his life, most of his land claims had been lost to lawyers, politicians, and better businessmen than he.

Extensive endnotes, fascinating cultural and historical background material, maps, illustrations, and an index underscore the scope of this distinguished and immensely entertaining work by a writer who, like novelist-turned- historian Shelby Foote, has the talent and the knowledge to make this legendary American come vividly to life.

John Gardner: Literary Outlaw by Barry Silesky from A Shannon Ravenel Book is $1.99

Book Description:

For a decade–from 1973 to 1982–John Gardner was one of America’s most famous writers and certainly its most flamboyantly opinionated. His 1973 novel, The Sunlight Dialogues, was on the New York Times bestseller list for fourteen weeks. Once in the limelight, he picked public fights with his peers, John Barth, Joseph Heller, and Norman Mailer among them, and wrote five more bestsellers.

Gardner’s personal life was as chaotic as his writing life was prolific. At twenty, he married his cousin Joan, and after a long marriage that was both passionate and violent, left her for Liz Rosenberg, a student. Only a few years later, he left Rosenberg for another student, Susan Thornton. Famous for disregarding his own safety, he rode his motorcycle at crazy speeds, incurred countless concussions, and once broke both of his arms. He survived what was diagnosed as terminal colon cancer only to resume his prodigious drinking and to die in a motorcycle accident at age forty-nine, a week before his third wedding.

Biographer Barry Silesky captures John Gardner’s fabulously contradictory genius and his capacity to both dazzle and infuriate. He portrays Gardner as a man of unrestrained energy and blatant contempt for convention and also as a man whose charisma drew students and devoted followers wherever he went. Amazingly, Gardner published twenty-nine books in all, including eleven fiction titles, a book-length epic poem, six books of medieval criticism, and a major biography. Twenty-one years after his death, his On Moral Fiction and The Art Of Fiction are still read and debated in MFA programs across the country.

This is a full-scale biography of a writer who was, for ten years, almost bigger than life. It lives up to its subject magnificently.

Salem Witch Judge by Eve LaPlante from HarperCollins is $3.79

Book Description:

In 1692 Puritan Samuel Sewall sent twenty people to their deaths on trumped-up witchcraft charges. The nefarious witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts represent a low point of American history, made famous in works by Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne (himself a descendant of one of the judges), and Arthur Miller. The trials might have doomed Sewall to infamy except for a courageous act of contrition now commemorated in a mural that hangs beneath the golden dome of the Massachusetts State House picturing Sewall’s public repentance. He was the only Salem witch judge to make amends.

But, remarkably, the judge’s story didn’t end there. Once he realized his error, Sewall turned his attention to other pressing social issues. Struck by the injustice of the New England slave trade, a commerce in which his own relatives and neighbors were engaged, he authored “The Selling of Joseph,” America’s first antislavery tract. While his peers viewed Native Americans as savages, Sewall advocated for their essential rights and encouraged their education, even paying for several Indian youths to attend Harvard College. Finally, at a time when women were universally considered inferior to men, Sewall published an essay affirming the fundamental equality of the sexes. The text of that essay, composed at the deathbed of his daughter Hannah, is republished here for the first time.

In Salem Witch Judge, acclaimed biographer Eve LaPlante, Sewall’s great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter, draws on family lore, her ancestor’s personal diaries, and archival documents to open a window onto life in colonial America, painting a portrait of a man traditionally vilified, but who was in fact an innovator and forefather who came to represent the best of the American spirit.

Quiver by Holly Luhning from Pegasus Books is $2.99

Book Description:

A masterful debut thriller about the original female Dracula and an underground gothic cult reenacting her ritualized killings in present day London

In sixteenth-century Hungary, Countess Elizabeth Bathory tortured and killed over six hundred servant girls in order to bathe in their blood. She believed this practice would keep her skin youthful and her beauty immortal.

Quiver tells the story of Danica, a forensic psychologist who works at a former insane asylum-turned-forensic hospital. One of Danica’s mental patients is Malcolm Foster, who is imprisoned for murdering a fourteen-year-old girl. Foster is a menacing but fascinating patient and Danica begins to suspect that Foster may have been the head of a gothic cabal idolizing Bathory. Her peers dismiss her discoveries, while disturbing incidents begin following her home from work.

Soon after her arrival in London, Danica receives a mysterious note from Maria, a seductive archivist with whom Danica has had an intriguing and complicated past. Maria claims she has Bathory’s diaries that chronicle her relentless torture of young women. As Maria increasingly insinuates herself into Danica’s life, soon Danica is in too deep to notice that Maria’s motivations are far from selfless; in fact, they may just cost Danica her life.