Ted Chiang,
Hell is the Absence of God. 1.25 regularly, at half-price should get you down to 14 cents, unless you're willing to drop in a bit more for something else.
Chiang is a truly excellent and inventive writer, who's only done short stories so far, but practically everything of his has gotten at least an award nomination. This particular one won Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and was also a Sturgeon nom, and if you like it, I highly recommend his collection Stories of Your Life (no longer sold on FW), which I personally own in two languages.
Seriously, if I'd known anything of his was available at FW, I'd have added it to the list.
However, if you don't care for the themes in HitAoG, typing "hugo nebula" into the Key Words search box brings up a bunch of double nominated/award winning stories, including stuff by Robert Silverberg, Ursula K. LeGuin, and others.
Forever Yours, Anna, 99 cents, by Kate Wilhelm is the best time-travel mystery/love story I've ever read (even moreso that Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is also an excellent comedy of errors, but alas, a Random House title). You said you didn't care for romance, so it might not be to your taste, but it's really not the sort of standard genre romance you may have been thinking of, and the story was nominated for Hugo and won Nebula, as well as being included in Dozois' Year's Best Science Fiction series.
Wilhelm also wrote one of the sf post-apocalyptic classics "Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang" (Hugo Award, Nebula nom), normally writes very well-received mysteries, and was married to fellow sf writer Damon Knight and used to run what became the Clarion workshop which has produced a lot of
well-known sf/fantasy writers.
Also, I should note that if you're tempted by anything of Mike Resnick's which says "Kirinyaga", the entire bundled collection of all his Kirinyaga stories is available at Baen's Webscription for a mere $5, with absolutely no DRM or geo-restrictions.