FREE/BARGAIN - General Fiction, Literature - 2014

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by Froide

Today's Open Road Media freebie at BN.com.

The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas

Overview:

Alexandre Dumas' novel of justice, retribution, and self-discovery - one of the most enduringly popular adventure tales ever written.

This novel tells the story of Edmond Dantes, wrongfully imprisoned for life in the supposedly impregnable sea fortress the Chateau d'If. After a daring escape, and after unearthing a hidden treasure revealed to him by a fellow prisoner, he devotes the rest of his life to tracking down and punishing the enemies who wronged him.

This is free for me, and it's 10:14 right now in Peru.

[Froide]

Cross-posted in FREE/BARGAIN - Science Fiction, Fantasy - August 2014.

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
by Edwin Abbot

Overview:
The beloved science fiction classic

In Flatland, the more sides a man has, the more powerful he is. Triangles are laborers and soldiers. Squares and pentagons are middle-class doctors and lawyers. Hexagons are nobility. Women, however, are straight lines, incapable of advancement in a two-dimensional world. Everything in Flatland is clear-cut and orderly, until the day an average citizen—a Square—dreams of a land of three dimensions. If three dimensions are possible, why not four? Or one? Soon, the Square’s provocative imagination and corresponding adventures threaten to turn the whole of Flatland against him.

First published in 1884, two decades before Einstein’s theory of relativity defined time as the fourth dimension, Edwin Abbott’s Flatland is both a prescient exploration of the unseen and a delightful skewering of Victorian social strictures.

This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.


Related Subjects:

Physics
Fiction & Literature Classics
Mathematics
World Literature
Physics
Geometry
Fiction Subjects
Science Fiction & Fantasy

FREE at BN.com

[Froide]

Thought I should share here important discussion points posted in response to the book's cross-post in FREE/BARGAIN - Science Fiction, Fantasy - August 2014.:

Originally Posted by HarryT

Make sure that you get an illustrated version. The illustrations are important to the text.

Thank you for the tip! The external links in the Wikipedia: Flatland article include illustrated versions as well as an audiobook.

[Froide]

Cross post from tubemonkey's post in the Kindle for Samsung Book Deals thread:

Kindle for Samsung -- Sep 2014

• A Trick of Light -- Karen Blomain -->[description added by me: psychological novel, newly widowed woman's response to learning her spouse was a bigamist]
• Undone by the Duke -- Michelle Willingham --> historical romance
• Technomancer -- BV Larson --> supernatural mystery
• They Never Die Quietly -- DM Annechino --> murder mystery

[Froide]

Beneath a Navajo Moon
by Lisa Carter

Free Fridays pick at BN.com

Overview:
What happens when danger and love collide under a Navajo moon?The search for a woman who disappeared in 1906 has lead cultural anthropologist Erin Dawson to Cedar Canyon, where the iconic terrain of red rock walls and mesas keep Navajo traditions—and maybe criminal evidence—well hidden. When Erin’s search leads her to cross paths with tribal policeman Adam Silverhorn, it’s hardly love at first sight. But everywhere she turns, Adam is already there.Fighting their feelings for each other, the two are suddenly thrust into a battle far more dangerous—a common quest to rout an insidious drug cartel that has spawned the recent rise in gang violence on the reservation. Adam’s position of authority gives Erin a rare glimpse into Navajo life few outsiders like her ever see—and into a crime ring that no one dares to imagine. As danger mounts, Adam and Erin begin to wonder if they will live to tell how they really feel.

Product Details
ISBN-13: 9781426787225
Publisher: Abingdon Press
Publication date: 3/4/2014
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Sales rank: 218,213
File size: 2 MB

[ATDrake]

Free from the author via KDP Select @ Amazon:

Get Out As Early As You Can by Barry Graham, 3rd in his Scottish Urban Gothic literary fiction series, originally out from Bloomsbury in 1992.

In this searing collection of stories, people try in various ways to escape the violence and depravity of urban Scotland.

A brutalized child rescues his sister in the only way he can imagine. An alienated, drug-addicted boxer fights to live and then lives to fight. A family man slashes faces for money. Lovers, killers, the desperate and the mad search for meaning, or someone to hold, or something to eat, in some of the meanest streets ever rendered in fiction.

Graham also offers some other KDP freebies today (mostly supernatural/horror-oriented): linkage for the lot

Free from the author via KDP Select @ Amazon:

Where Lightning Strikes: Poems on the Holocaust by Alexandria Constantinova Szeman. Szeman has been previously published by HarperCollins under the penname "Sherri Szeman", and one of her fiction novels has been discussed academically in various journals (we got it free a couple of years ago, which is how I happen to remember this). She lists a bunch of poetry/literature prizes in her blurb as well.

The poems in this collection revisit the classic themes that have inspired poets for generations: love, passion, betrayal, doubt, loyalty, despair, faith, and survival — this time in the context of the period before, during, and after the Holocaust with its systematic persecution and extermination of the majority of European Jewry by the Nazi regime.

Szeman also offers some more KDP freebies today, another poetry collection and some kind of thriller: linkage for the lot

[ATDrake]

Free from the author via KDP Select @ Amazon:

The Bridge by Kay Bratt, a short story set in China. Bratt has had a non-fiction memoir about her journey to a Chinese orphanage published by Mariner Books, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

In present day China, an old woman's house sits opposite an ancient bridge. Not just any bridge--but a special one because it has always been known as 'The Lucky Bridge.' In olden days, it was said to bring a traveler good luck if walked over during a marriage ceremony, or at the beginning of the New Year. Because of its reputation, over the years it has also became a popular place for young mothers to abandon their children. What to some may seem cruel, is in reality a mother's final gift to their offspring--one last chance to send their baby off to a new destiny with luck on their side. Jing, an old woman, is the unofficial... and often reluctant, guardian of the bridge. Because no one else will do it, Jing often steps in to prevent the children from frostbite, abuse and hunger. Then she delivers them safely to an orphanage. This has been her burdensome routine for many years, but what will the old woman do when the latest child--a blind boy--burrows too deeply into her heart...

[ATDrake]

Free from the author via KDP Select @ Amazon:

52 Songs, 52 Stories by Iain Rowan (ISFDB), a collection of short stories written from the inspiration of selected pop-culture songs. Rowan has had sfnal shorts appear in Prime Books-published collections, and some of his crime shorts have appeared in the Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazines and won the Derringer Dagger Award.

A very simple idea. Each week for a year, I picked a song at random, wrote a story inspired by it, and published it on the web to an audience of several thousand. This book is the result.

Fifty-two songs, fifty-two stories.

A mix of genres and themes, as you might expect from stories inspired by artists as diverse as the Velvet Underground, John Cage, The Beastie Boys, Tom Waits, The Cure, Lee Hazlewood, My Bloody Valentine, Johnny Cash, LCD Soundsystem and Justin Timberlake.

Also still free from the author @ Smashwords (may be price-matched elsewhere)

Looking for Goats, Finding Monkeys by Iain Rowan (as I. F. Rowan), ancient China fantasy/horror adventure short originally published in Black Gate magazine.

Dao Shi is not a bad man. Granted, he is a liar and a charlatan and a con-man, but aside from that he's not a bad man. He earns his living with mumbo-jumbo and magic tricks, convincing the gullible and superstitious that he is a master exorcist who can rid them of the demons and hungry ancestor-spirits that they blame for their bad luck, even though the closest Dao Shi has come to a ghost has been in his bad dreams after over-indulging at Mama Shen's.

One day though, Dao Shi runs into much more than he bargained for…

He also has a few more freebie crime/horror shorts (including an award-nominated one) which can be found via Smashwords keyword search for his name.

[Froide]

Today's Open Road Media freebie:

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
by G.K. Chesterton

• At Amazon.com
• At BN.com

Overview:

Allegorical tale of a detective infiltrating a group of anarchists who plan to destroy the world.

From the Publisher:"A powerful picture of the loneliness and bewilderment which each of us encounters in his single-handed struggle with the universe."
--C. S. Lewis

[Froide]

Today's Open Road Media freebie:

The King in Yellow
by Robert W. Chambers

• At Amazon.com
• At BN.com

Overview:

"The King in Yellow, a series of vaguely connected short stories having as a background a monstrous and suppressed book whose perusal brings fright, madness, and spectral tragedy, really achieves notable heights of cosmic fear in spite of uneven interest and a somewhat trivial and affected cultivation of the Gallic studio atmosphere made popular by Du Maurier's Trilby. The most powerful of its tales, perhaps, is "The Yellow Sign", in which is introduced a silent and terrible churchyard watchman with a face like a puffy grave-worm's." - from the Introduction by H.P. Lovecraft.

[BelleZora]

Sherman Alexie's Ten Little Indians is on sale for $2.99 from Open Road Media today. It is couponable at Kobo. I used one of the 35% codes (Comeback5cr87) posted today on the Kobo coupon thread and picked it up for $1.94.

Although I haven't yet read this book, Mr. Alexie is among my favorite writers. If you don't know his work, please consider that you might be missing something very good. Goodreads

A finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, this bestselling collection from master storyteller Sherman Alexie tackles love, loss, basketball—and everything in between

The characters that populate the lyrical and affectionate tales in Ten Little Indians battle stereotypes and navigate the crossroads of culture in life off the reservation. Richard, the narrator of “Lawyer’s League,” grows up in Seattle the son of “an African American giant who played defensive end for the University of Washington Huskies” and “a petite Spokane Indian ballerina.” Estelle Walks Above (née Estelle Miller), the mother of the narrator in “The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above,” studies her way off the Spokane Indian Reservation and into the University of Washington, and goes on to both enjoy and resent the company of the white women of Seattle—who see her as a shamanic genius, and look to her for guidance on everything from sex and fashion to spirituality and politics.

These and the other stories in Ten Little Indians run the gamut from earthy humor to sobering emotional truth, mapping the outer reaches of the human heart.

Kobo
Amazon

[ATDrake]

Free again from the author via KDP Select @ Amazon:

God Plays Favorites by Charlie Carillo, a (secular) literary fiction novel about a newspaper contest and its winners in New York City. This appears to be one of his self-published efforts, but Carillo's 1986 novel, Shepherd Avenue, which we've also gotten free via KDP in the past, was named one of the American Library Association's Best Books of the Year, and he has written for the New York Post and Huffington Post. Also, we've previously received two others of his in-print novels as official publisher promo freebies from Kensington Books.

An Ivy League graduate who grew up on Park Avenue takes his first job at the most sensational tabloid newspaper in New York City - and soon finds himself writing promotional stories about a cash giveaway contest intended to keep the paper alive! Jack Stone is not your everyday reporter, and his real education doesn’t begin in earnest until he hooks up with streetwise photographer Vinnie Corcora to do stories about the contest winners - a cast of characters who bring new meaning to "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” It’s a wild ride that defies expectations and stereotypes, and along the way Jack earns a Ph.D in the human condition - while learning the true meaning of love, loyalty and friendship.

[ATDrake]

Free again from the author via KDP Select @ Amazon:

Shepherd Avenue by Charlie Carillo, a coming-of-age literary fiction novel set in an Italian-American family living in New York, originally out from Atlantic Monthly Press in 1986 and later picked up by a Random House imprint as well. This is the title which got him the ALA Best Books of the Year List nod.

After his mother's death, a shy 10-year-old boy from the suburbs must find a place for himself with his grandmother's boisterous Italian-American family in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood in the summer of 1961.

[Froide]

Today's Open Road freebie:

The Awakening
by Kate Chopin

At:

• Amazon.com (not free, yet)
• BN.com
• Kobo.com

Overview:

Novelist and short story writer Kate Chopin (1851-1904) was the first American woman to deal with women's roles as wives and mothers. The Awakening (1899), her most famous novel, concerns a woman, dissatisfied with her indifferent husband, who gives in to her desire for other men and commits adultery. This is a searing depiction of the religious and social pressures brought to bear on women who transgress restrictive Victorian codes of behavior.

An American classic of sexual expression that paved the way for the modern novel, The Awakening is both a remarkable novel in its own right and a startling reminder of how far women in this century have come. The story of a married woman who pursues love outside a stuffy, middle-class marriage, the novel portrays the mind of a woman seeking fulfillment of her essential nature.

Editorial Review (Times):
Kate Chopin is a pioneer in the treatment of sexuality in American literature… She does not speak only to women, but she speaks most powerfully about them.

[Dr. Drib]

Chopin now free at Amazon.

Thank you for the info on the post above mine.