Kindle Daily Post

A Gaijin Primer: The Best and Worst of Being Foreign in Japan

Guest post by Tim Anderson, author of Tune in Tokyo, just $7.99 on Kindle.

Foreigners in Japan—gaijin, as they are called—face a fascinating array of benefits and hazards as they make their way through the country’s streets, karaoke boxes, noodle shops, company parties, game centers, and love hotels. So why not have a look at the best and worst of these? It’ll be fun, trust me.

Fun thing #1: You Have Automatic Allure

To make a splash when you are a foreigner (non-Asian) in Japan, just step out of your tiny matchbox apartment and onto the narrow street that you will get lost on. Folks will stare at you. Sometimes with genuine curiosity, sometimes because you are so weird and gangly, sometimes because they can’t believe how big your nose is. Get used to it. If you go into a shop, they will stare at you, often somewhat distrustfully, because you have those big western hands and feet and are likely to knock something over if you’re not stared at enough. When was the last time anyone paid this much attention to you in your home country? It’s probably been weeks. And you had to run outside naked, covered in Cool Whip, and screaming “I am the 99%” to get anyone to look at you. But in Japan? Just walk outside and wait for the eyeballs to land on your ungainly body. You’ll get used to the attention, you may start to believe the hype, and you’ll miss it when it’s over.

Bummer #1: You Feel Fat All the Time

This is a direct result of the immediately preceding Fun Thing. The longer you are in Japan, the more in tune you become with the natives around you. You get used to the tiny spaces, the crowds, the microscopic candies, the modest portion sizes at meals. And the more you immerse yourself in the daily culture of Japan, the more likely you are to think that western folks are just too damn large. My friend Rachel once caught a glimpse of some giant American slob in a store window as she passed by it, and she couldn’t help but ask herself, “God, who is that enormous beast?” To her shock, she realized that she was looking at her own reflection. I know how crestfallen she must have felt. I once nearly wept real tears when I saw a reflection of myself in a mirror going down an escalator next to a 109-year-old woman half my size. I looked like Frankenstein’s monster.

Fun thing #2: You Get Away with Things

One thing you will certainly get used to is doing things wrong, all the time, forever. Japan is a country of nuance and inborn cultural knowledge. You will misunderstand many things. For example, early on in my stay in Tokyo, I asked a class of mine what Japanese people eat for breakfast. (I wanted to know what their version of biscuits and sausage gravy was.) Most of the people had the same answer: rice and miso soup. I thought this sounded like a pretty good way to start the day, especially in the colder months, so I started eating a lot of rice and miso soup. Thing is: I foolishly assumed that when folks said they eat “rice and miso soup” that they meant they ate them together, like in the same bowl. You know, like mixing your grits with your scrambled cheese eggs. YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO DO THIS, ESPECIALLY IN PUBLIC. Japanese folks say that this is like eating dog food. But I was a gaijin, so folks expected me to do things wrong. It’s what gaijin do. If I were a Japanese person doing this, I would be an outcast and would be promptly banished from polite society (and my family would probably have to pay monetary compensation to anyone who was forced to witness my social crime).

Bummer #2: You Can’t Buy Any of the Awesome Clothes You See

Tokyo has awesome shops and you will just want to buy all those cool faux-leather jackets with the funky ‘80s collars and the T-shirts featuring adorable little guinea pigs and messages on them saying something like “Probably Not.” Stop what you’re doing. You will not be able to fit into this stuff. Your pectorals will poke through that T-shirt in a most unseemly fashion, your belly will rear its button, and you will not be able to negotiate one sleeve of that jacket onto your body. Shoe shopping is just asking for trouble. You will find all of this very frustrating, but get used to it. And take heart: because the Japanese diet has changed so much recently, there are bound to be more Big and Tall shops popping up. America is still really good at exporting obesity.

And, to end on a positive note:

Fun Thing #3: No Matter How Terrible and Downright Offensive Your Japanese Is, Japanese People Will Compliment You On How Great Your Japanese Is

Unlike the French, who are constitutionally incapable of giving you a damn break, the Japanese really appreciate efforts you make with their language, like when you say “hello, how are you?” or “That’s a cute kitten, where did you kill it?” I was constantly amazed at how the little squeaks of Japanese I was able to emit in my first months all received across-the-board wonderful reviews from whoever I was attempting to speak to. “One of the year’s 10 best!” “A wild, seductive, musical romp of a sentence!” Of course, this can start to feel a little patronizing at times, especially when you are studying constantly and trying to manage a coherent conversation in a terribly difficult language. But, when you get down to it, compliments are like cream-filled donuts: there can never be too many, and they can never be too big. So just suck it up and enjoy your donuts.

--Tim Anderson

"Thirst" A New Russian Classic?

"All the vodka wouldn’t fit in the fridge. First I tried standing the bottles up, and then I laid them on their sides, one on top of the other. The bottles stacked up like transparent fish."

The staccato beginning and spare prose of Andrei Gelasimov's slender yet thought provoking novel, Thirst, is reminiscent of Camus' iconic and emotionally removed opening line of The Stranger: "Maman died today." Yet these two works are immediately different in their world views: whereas Camus’ narrator Meursault lives emotionally untouched by the events happening around him, Gelasimov’s Kostya, a young soldier maimed beyond recognition in a tank explosion, is so deeply haunted by his past and affected by his new identity in the present, that he can only find solace in vodka…lots of vodka.

That is, until his attention is turned elsewhere.

When two army buddies show up at his door, Kostya is mobilized to help them find their missing friend, Seryoga, the soldier who saved them all from their burning tank. As they comb the streets of Moscow searching for Seryoga, Kostya combs through his childhood memories of growing up in the city, and images of the war. As he extracts these memories and makes new connections with his estranged family, Kostya slowly rebuilds his image of himself, even though outwardly, his appearance has been so drastically altered by the scars of war.

As he reconstructs his shattered identity from the inside out, others also begin to recognize him for who he really is. Even the little boy next door confides in Kostya:

"I know."
"What is it that you know?"
"I know I know."
"What is it that you know you know?"
"That you’re not scary. You just have that face."

The author himself confesses in a Q&A with Amazon that he wrote the book for the generations "doomed to redeem sins they never committed." Read on this level, Andrei Gelasimov's Thirst is an elegantly written rumination on how an individual's (or a country's, a generation's) outward face, does not always reflect one's true self.--Sarah Tomashek

Thirst is available on Kindle for $5.68

Author Spotlight: Condoleezza Rice on "No Higher Honor"

Writing No Higher Honor, a memoir of my years in Washington, has afforded me the opportunity to revisit the historic and challenging events of my eight years of government service.  I hope that, by reading the book, you’ll be able to develop a sense of who I am--particularly, my determination to find solutions to sometimes insurmountable problems, a characteristic that helped me confront the immense challenges of being National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State. 

The book begins with my last day at the State Department, but then quickly turns to this journey’s beginning--those first discussions with a certain Governor from Texas about joining his presidential campaign team.  From there, my story continues and reveals the human side of our actions responding to the attacks on 9/11 and its aftermath.  There’s no question that my years as National Security Advisor were shaped by these devastating events and our resolve to make sure that nothing like it ever happened again on our watch.

As National Security Advisor, I was staff to the President--rarified staff to be sure, but staff--and my life revolved around the President.  However, in the second four years of the Administration, things were quite different.  As Secretary of State, I was the senior Cabinet official and America's chief diplomat.  I set out to repair the relationships with our allies and to reaffirm the primacy of diplomacy in our foreign policy.  The President needed a renewed approach to the world and I was honored to lead this effort for him. 

I loved representing America to friend and foe.  I worked to mitigate crises, seek common ground among bitter enemies, and further agreement on sometimes very divisive issues. These efforts required me to build very interesting relationships with tough men such as Ariel Sharon, Vladimir Putin, Colonel Qaddafi and Hamid Karzai--and with conservative Arabs such as King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and Shia clerics who couldn’t shake my hand because I was a woman. 

As Secretary of State, I was also the face of America to the world.  The fact that I am a black woman who grew up in segregated Birmingham was not lost on those with whom I dealt, and it spoke volumes about how far America--and I--had come.

--Condoleezza Rice

Author Spotlight: Stephen Leather on "The Basement"

Below is a guest post by Stephen Leather, author of The Basement.

The Basement was very much an experiment, a book that I wrote in between two of my action thrillers. Thrillers are generally written in the third person, which allows you to switch between multiple viewpoints. But I wanted to try writing in the first person, which really allows you to get inside the head of a character.

But then I realized that I could have much more fun if I also wrote in the second person. That reads as if you are standing behind a character and telling them what they are doing. It’s a quite a strange way of telling a story, where the reader effectively becomes the narrator, a technique which was used to great effect by Jay McInerney in his novel Bright Lights, Big City.

What made The Basement such a fascinating book to write is that the story alternates between two viewpoints – one in the first person and another in the second person.

The first person viewpoint is that of Marvin Waller, a New York-based screenwriter who isn’t half as smart as he thinks he is. Waller is trying to pitch his ideas to movie people in New York but isn’t having much luck. And the more he is rejected, the more frustrated he becomes.

The second person viewpoint is that of a psychopath who has been torturing and killing women in a basement somewhere in the city. The torture scenes aren’t graphic and it becomes clear that the psychopath is more interested in exerting control than in inflicting pain. But the torture always ends the same way - once the victim has become fully compliant, or trained, they are killed.

Two New York detectives are convinced that Waller is the killer, but they have a hard time proving it – especially when Waller goes on the attack and starts to make their lives a misery.

The detectives know that the psychopath has a new victim and that the clock is ticking. If they don’t identify the killer, another girl will die. But is Waller the killer? It certainly seems so, and the suspense is ratcheted up as the reader is led to believe that the two viewpoints are from the same character – that Waller goes into second person mode when he is torturing and killing down in the basement and is in first person mode as he moves around the city.

As the detectives close in on Waller, the truth eventually emerges. And that’s where there is one final twist that makes the reader reassess everything that has gone before and which will hopefully leave them breathless. That’s if I’ve done it right, of course!

--Stephen Leather

"The Big Deal" in Kindle Books: Nov 27 to Dec 4

As a part of Cyber Monday Deals Week, we are discounting hundreds of Kindle books to $0.99, $1.99, $2.99, and $3.99.  Shop for yourself, or give Kindle books--delivered when you want--to anyone with an email address.  Offer ends on December 4, 2011.

Check out a few of the bestselling books on sale:

The Art of Racing in the Rain ($3.99) by Garth Stein

A heart-wrenching but deeply funny and ultimately uplifting story of family, love, loyalty, and hope, The Art of Racing in the Rain is a beautifully crafted and captivating look at the wonders and absurdities of human life . . . as only a dog could tell it.

 

Hunter ($1.99) by Aimee Bender

Who is hunter?  Who is prey?  Who will survive?  Award-winning true-crime author Robert Bidinotto makes his stunning fiction debut with a thriller about two lovers whose deadly secrets threaten to both of their lives. 

 

The Living End ($2.99) by Stanley Elkin

The story of one man’s redemptive journey to hell and back, Elkin’s darkly comic novel of the afterlife—The Living End— is a hilarious send-up of afterlife clichés and a masterful exploration of the absurdities of human existence.

 

Ancestor ($0.99) by Scott Sigler

New York Times bestselling author Scott Sigler takes readers on the ultimate thrill-ride—and offers a chilling cautionary account of what can happen when hubris, greed, and madness drive scientific experimentation past the brink of reason.

 

Browse "The Big Deal" in Kindle Books to find more great reads. Sale ends on December 4 2011.

--Jacqueline Segall

Guest Blogger: Jill Shalvis, author of "Small Town Christmas"

New York Times best-selling author Jill Shalvis lives in a small town in the Sierras also run by quirky characters. Any resemblance to the quirky characters in her books are, um, mostly coincidental.

I grew up in a town like my fictional Lucky Harbor.  Well, without the beach.  And without the lush rainforest.  And of course, without the wildly sexy heroes on every street corner.

But like Lucky Harbor, my home town wasn’t big on secrets.  Oh, you could drop a hundred dollar bill and someone would run after you to hand it over, but you couldn’t keep a secret to save your life.  Another thing you can’t do: go to the grocery store in your pj’s because you will run into the school principal, your hair dresser, and if you’re especially lucky, your Ob-Gyn.  And don’t even think about what will happen if you get pulled over for speeding or accidentally go out with toilet paper on your shoe.  Everyone in the place would know of such an embarrassing situation by nightfall.

Lucky Harbor is like that too.  If you do something silly, say accidentally drink too much eggnog with your sisters and decorate your Christmas tree while under the influence, everyone will know it (read Simply Irresistible). 

And if you accidentally fall in love with someone you never expected, everyone will know it even before you do. They’ll know, they’ll discuss, they’ll conclude, and they’ll let you know exactly what they think about it (see The Sweetest Thing). All in the name of neighborly love, of course.  It’s just the way it is in Lucky Harbor.

I have loved writing a series of books in such a close-knit place.  I started with three disenchanted, estranged sisters, all of them unknowingly searching for something that’s missing from their lives.  The oldest two, Maddie and Tara, have their stories reprinted in a special 2-in-1 volume entitled Christmas in Lucky Harbor. 

And I loved the town so much I revisited it for my short novella Small Town Christmas, weaving the magic of the holiday, the spirit of love, and the theme of forgiveness all together.

I hope to travel back to Lucky Harbor in many more novels.  The town still has a lot of stories to tell.  And a lot of secrets to spill…

Treasure your loved ones this holiday season,

Jill Shalvis

"Vaccine Nation": Truth Bleeds into a Thriller ($2.99)

Guest post by David Lender

When I started formulating ideas for my new thriller, Vaccine Nation, I settled first on writing about a gutsy, strong-willed woman protagonist. Dani North is 29-year-old award-winning documentary filmmaker and a single mom. Within the first few pages of the novel, she finds herself on the run and forced to live by her wits to stay alive.

Vaccine Nation is a fast-paced action thriller intended to be reminiscent of James Grady's Six Days of the Condor or Hitchcock's North by Northwest. While the book is designed to entertain, it also explores the very real issues in the current debate over vaccine safety in the mandatory U.S. National Immunization Program. Vaccine Nation is a dramatization of this debate, presented in the form of a thriller that will hopefully leave you breathless and make you think.

In Vaccine Nation, Dani just won at the Tribeca Film Festival for a documentary film critical of the pharmaceutical industry. She’s also just started work on a new documentary on autism. When a pharmaceutical industry vaccine researcher hands her smoking gun evidence about the U.S. National Immunization Program seconds before he’s murdered right in front of her, Dani finds herself implicated and pursued by the police.

She realizes what she’s been handed could have crucial implications on upcoming hearings by a Senate committee. The committee will reconsider Congress’ 1986 decision to grant the pharmaceutical industry immunity for claims by parents on damage to their children from the U.S. National Immunization Program. That puts Dani on the run in a race to understand and expose the evidence. That is, before the police can grab her, or Grover Madsen, a megalomaniacal pharmaceutical industry CEO, can have her hunted down by his hired killers. Madsen knows the explosive impact the data Dani has will have on the pharmaceutical industry: it would lead to lawsuits and subsequent multi-billion dollar settlements that would dwarf those that the tobacco industry made last decade. 

The facts and issues in Vaccine Nation are accurate—the 1986 Congressional grant of immunity to the pharmaceutical industry, the toxicity of certain ingredients of vaccines, the controversy surrounding the safety and side-effects of vaccines, and vaccines’ suspected relationship to the autism epidemic. The debate on vaccine safety is increasing: recent CDC statistics show that 10 percent of parents (up from 2 to 3 percent) are avoiding or delaying vaccinating their children because of concerns about vaccine safety.

David Lender is the bestselling author of Trojan Horse, The Gravy Train and Bull Street. Vaccine Nation, his newest book, is now available on Kindle for $2.99.

Guest Blogger: National Book Award Winner for Fiction, Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won five Hopwood Awards for essays, drama, and fiction. She has been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and a Grisham Visiting Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. She is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of South Alabama. Her debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds, was an Essence Book Club selection, a Black Caucus of the ALA Honor Award recipient, and a finalist for both the Virginia Commonwealth University Cabell First Novelist Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. This year she won the National Book Award for her novel, Salvage the Bones.

Spurred by the death of my brother, my first novel was something of a love letter to the kind of young black men that I grew up with: these young men were tender, fierce, worldly, and sometimes, painfully naïve. In my second novel, I wanted to write a book that revolved around the kind of young women I grew up with; I wanted to pen a love letter to them. Specifically, I wanted to write about a young girl who is growing up in a world full of men, and I wanted to explore how she understands womanhood, how she fares under all the pressures that bear down on poor black girls in the South. I’d also wanted to write about the character that would become Esch’s brother, Skeetah, and his pit bull, for years. There was something about the strange love that Skeetah felt for his dog that fascinated me. As I wrote the novel, I discovered that the strange love Skeetah felt for his dog was only one of many loves that would be central to the book and influence Esch’s understanding of womanhood and motherhood.

I wanted to write Salvage the Bones because I loved these characters so much I wanted them to speak. I wanted readers needed to know what it means to be a young black girl in the South, what it means for Esch to find models of womanhood in the world, for readers to understand how these models affect her and girls like her. I also wanted to write about Hurricane Katrina once I was able to crawl out of the despair the hurricane inspired in me because I wanted to write against the stereotypes that I encountered about people who didn’t evacuate for the storm. I wanted to reveal that people who stayed here for the storm did so because they had always done so, that their refusal to evacuate was dictated by habit, a lack of means, and a sense of loyalty: as they’d always done, they would face this storm in their homes. In this way, the Batiste family is like many families on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Even though Esch’s and Skeetah’s and their family’s stories are specific to a certain time and place, I hope that readers understand that in larger ways, they aren’t. Just as Esch is able to read books about Greek mythology and find something of herself in them and them in her, I’m hoping that readers read Salvage the Bones and find themselves in my characters, and my characters in them.

--Jesmyn Ward

John Locke Reviews the Thriller "Stirred" ($2.99 on Kindle)

I no longer write reviews. If you know me at all, you know this about me. But when I read Stirred, I had to make an exception. The writing team of Blake Crouch and J.A. Konrath represents the major leagues to a sandlot player like me. When Mantle and Marris invite you to sit in the Yankee dugout and watch them knock one out of the park, what are you going to say—you’re too busy?

You find time. You make time. And afterward, you’re glad you did, because you saw something special. Stirred is that kind of special. It’s a major league, bottom-of-the-ninth, bases-loaded home run of a book!

Here’s what you want to know: Former police Lieutenant Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels is quite familiar with psychotic killer Luther Kite’s handiwork. Last time she encountered Kite, Jack had been forced to watch him murder one of his victims in a manner so savage and brutal it traumatized the veteran investigator.

Recently retired from an amazing career that made her a legend in precincts and prisons alike, Jack finds herself eight months’ pregnant, and suffering from preeclampsia. She’d like to create a semi-normal life for her family-to-be, and she could, if stone killers like Luther Kite and his ilk would remain in her past. Unfortunately, Kite has other plans. He’s resurfaced in Jack’s life with a vengeance, and the body count is piling up.

Flanked by closest friends Phin Troutt, Harry McGlade and Herb Benedict, Jack learns that the bodies of Luther’s latest victims contain clues that only she can solve. Against her doctors’ orders, Jack puts her health on hold and her life on the line to confront Kite in a relentless battle of wits where the fate of her unborn child hangs in the balance. Jack thought she had a pretty good handle on Luther Kite, but as one clue builds on another, she comes to the terrible realization Kite has spared no expense in his quest to make Jack’s life a living hell.

The battle lines between good and evil are drawn, and evil has had years to prepare. It’s personal between Jack and Luther, as personal as it gets. But when the two come face to face, as you know they must, Jack is forced to realize, for the first time in her life, how the decisions she’s made—and those she’s about to make—impact the lives of her closest friends.

Best-selling mystery thriller reviews typically generate comments like heart-stopping, pulse-pounding, terrifying, gripping, chilling, and must-read. Stirred has all those elements, but while we’re at it, let’s add laugh out loud, because you will. This is not a subtle book. It’s more of a grab-you-by-the-throat, lift-you-off-the-floor, and slam-you-against-the-nearest-wall type of book. The evil characters get under your skin. The good ones get into your heart. Just an aside, but look for the characters Donaldson and Lucy (from Crouch's & Konrath's Serial Killers Uncut), as they are two of the best I’ve encountered in a lifetime of reading.

Five stars. --John Locke

John Locke is the international best-selling author of eleven books in three different genres. He is the 8th author in history to have sold one million eBooks on Kindle, and the first self-published author in history to have done so.

Comics & Graphic Novels Now Available on Kindle Fire

We're excited to announce that over 100 comics and graphic novels are now available in ebook format for the first time exclusively for use on Kindle Fire, the new full-color touch-screen Kindle device.  Titles include Alan Moore's Hugo Award-winning graphic novel, Watchmen, as well as the best-selling graphic novels Batman: Year One, Superman: Earth One, and Neil Gaiman's acclaimed Sandman series.

With Kindle Fire, you can enjoy your books in vivid, full-color layouts with the convenience of the Kindle reading experience.  Graphic novels come alive on Kindle Fire with Kindle Panel View. Double-tap on any region to see it magnified. You can also swipe forward or backward to be guided through the panels in the author’s own sequence for an immersive reading experience.

Explore the full selection of comics and graphic novels available on Kindle in the all-new Comics & Graphic Novels store.