Kindle Daily Post

Guest Blogger: Duncan Jepson, author of "All the Flowers in Shanghai"

Duncan Jepson is the award-winning director and producer of five feature films. He has also produced documentaries for Discovery Channel Asia and National Geographic Channel. He was the editor of the Asia-based fashion magazine West East and is a founder and managing editor of the Asia Literary Review.

In writing All the Flowers in Shanghai I wanted to explore Chinese attitudes towards motherhood, children and family. Similar to many Asian cultures, a Chinese mother plays a central role with the father being the provider, often a silent provider. The dynamic in a Chinese family between father, mother, sons and daughters is complicated. It was, and largely still is, a patriarchal structure with the mother required to focus on raising the children. Historically, there was always a preference for sons over daughters, traditionally explained by the practical need for strong arms and hands in the fields. It is difficult to accept the relevance of this reasoning today, but those urges of preference and discrimination are still present whether among the poor or rich. It is an ugly and inexcusable way to think and act, and it is this relationship between a Chinese mother and daughter I wanted to focus on in my story.

As a Eurasian, but brought up in the UK, over years of studying, dating, traveling, and working in Singapore, Hong Kong and China, I have noticed that often this favoritism of sons over daughters, and often eldest over youngest, is regularly promoted by the mothers themselves. It is as though providing and raising a son, guarding the family name, must be done regardless of the cost to those around them, even though in modern Asia the cost is unnecessary. Like some atavistic calling, the prejudices must be maintained no matter that they contradict logic and fairness and, most importantly to me, are continued by many mothers in the face of their own experiences of this same attitude.

But the preference does not always stop at favoritism and its wretched cousin, discrimination, it can become the actual victimization of daughters. At worse, as is well documented, a daughter can be rejected and abandoned on the street to die or more simply drowned. I wanted to use this story to explore how a mother could intentionally treat a daughter in this manner, having often been treated this way themselves; to understand what forces would push a woman to act this way. I wondered what must then happen for a mother to reconsider how she treats her daughter and what event must occur to awaken her to become fully aware and cognizant of the senselessness of this prejudice, particularly in a culture that declares its belief in family so fervently. Finally, I wanted to explore what prevents others from intervening and interrupting this “philosophy.” In the end, let’s be clear, everyone is culpable for the harm caused.

My mother told me that she had made up her mind not to return to Singapore only a few years after arriving in the UK. She might have missed home, and I think she always did, but the enjoyment and prospect of freedom from tradition and conservative expectations was not to be sacrificed for anything. She felt that Chinese women needed to question the lives they were asked to lead and should be able to choose how and with whom they would spend their futures. I believe she would have liked the intentions behind my story and I wished she could have read it.

--Duncan Jepson

Hated by Her Fans and Vilified by the Media

Guest post by Tyler McMahon

My novel How the Mistakes Were Made tells the story of Laura Loss, a punk rock veteran who rises to fame with Seattle grunge band The Mistakes. After the group’s demise, Laura ends up hated by her fans, vilified by the press, and cynical toward the music scene she’s spent her life in. I’ve been asked many times: Who is this character based on? It’s a question that’s caught me off guard, and which has no simple answer.

Readers and critics often compare Laura Loss to Courtney Love, and that’s a fair point. But that’s not a biographical connection, so much as a hypothetical one. Years ago, I read an article about a disagreement between Love and the two surviving Nirvana members, over a yet-unreleased song. The writer closed the piece with a sarcastic rhetorical question: “she wasn’t actually in the band, right?” That got me thinking: what if she had been in the band? Would we—the public—be any more sympathetic?

I’ve said elsewhere that Laura’s persona is indebted to Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth. That’s also where I cribbed her interest in painting. I knew that Gordon had studied art, and published articles in art magazines. Though Laura’s interest in painting became more historical and canonical, I liked the idea of her having a passion on the side.

There are many musicians that contributed to her character—Patti Smith, Kathleen Hanna, the girl who fronted a Boise band called Manville, and others. But one of the biggest sources of inspiration wasn’t a musician at all.

When I was a teenager, I learned that a friend had attended high school with the younger sister of Ian MacKaye (frontman of Minor Threat and Fugazi, and founder of Dischord Records). It seems silly now, but the notion of Ian having a little sister immediately took hold on my imagination. I was young and naïve enough to see all musicians as larger than life, even the staunchly independent ones. Ian’s legacy—in terms of music, ideals, and business practices—seemed a long and complicated shadow to grow up in, especially for a younger sibling. The idea crept into my mind and holed up there for the next twenty years or so, until I finally wrote this novel.

Tyler McMahon is the author of the novel How the Mistakes Were Made. He lives in Honolulu with his wife, food writer Dabney Gough, and teaches at Hawai‘i Pacific University.

New to Kindle: Hubert Selby

“Last Exit to Brooklyn should explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years,” predicted Allen Ginsberg when Hubert Selby's first novel burst onto the literary scene in 1964.

And that's exactly what it did. Selby’s writing became famous for its gritty portrayal of addiction and urban despair in America, which has influenced subsequent generations of authors, artists, and musicians.

Nearly fifty years later, this month marks the Kindle release of four titles by Hubert Selby. Where to begin?

In Last Exit to Brooklyn, Selby uncovers the underbelly of New York City with his portrayal of Brooklyn’s prostitutes, drunks, addicts, and johns. Hailed as a classic of postwar American literature, The New York Times Book Review credits it as “a vision of hell so stern it cannot be chuckled or raged aside.”

Requiem for a Dream explores the many dangerous facets of addiction. Selby details the life of Sara Goldfarb, whose life, after the death of her husband, has been consumed with obsessing over game shows and diet pills. Paralleled with her addiction is her son’s own dependence on heroin. The realistic depiction of addiction led to The Nation describing it as “one of the greatest novels of the century.” (And yes, the novel is even more terrifying than the movie.)

The Demon examines the dangerous consequences of a womanizer attempting to regain self-control. Attempts at restraint awaken something sinister, causing the womanizer to seek excitement in a new form of violence and depravity. Shocking and enthralling, The Demon is an unflinching meditation on male vanity by one of the most acclaimed and original writers of the twentieth century.

In The Room, Selby manages to create a believable journey into the depths of madness, which is made even more gripping by matching the narrator’s insanity with an indelible humanity. Selby himself found this work so frightening that he couldn't bring himself to read it for decades after writing it.

Selby's aptitude for detailing despair has led to The New York Times placing him “in the first rank of American novelists . . . to understand his work is to understand the anguish of America.”

Selby supporters were interviewed for the launch, including musician Henry Rollins, poet and playwright Amiri Baraka (Blues People), and author Jerry Stahl (Permanent Midnight).

“I just couldn’t understand how anyone puts together something that utterly magnificent, cruel, beautiful, and complete . . . . He made the English language a beautiful street fight,” said Rollins.

Selby’s writing style and subject matter were a vast departure from the norms of literature at the time. “It was, at the time, breakthrough writing because of what he was focused on. That marginalia, that kind of life outside of the mainstream,” said Baraka.

Although he inspired writers to write in a similar style, Selby’s prose continues to be distinct. “A lot of writers now are like, ‘I’m so dark and edgy and transgressive. I’ve been there.’ But Selby wasn’t trying, this was just his natural venue, his world,” said Stahl.

Witness it for yourself: download Last Exit to Brooklyn, Requiem for a Dream, The Demon, and The Room to your Kindle today.

A Tuscan Sojourn for Canal House Cooking

This is a guest post from Melissa Hamilton and Christopher Hirsheimer. Together they make up the dynamic duo that write, photograph, and design the Canal House Cooking series. Volume 7, La Dolce Vita, is available January 17th.

We rented a farmhouse in Tuscany—a remote, rustic old stucco and stone house at the end of a gravel road, deep in the folds of vine-covered hills. It had a stone terrace with a long table for dinners outside, a grape arbor, and apple and fig trees loaded with fruit in the garden. There was no phone, TV, or Internet service, just a record player and shelves and shelves of books. It had a spare, simple kitchen with a classic waist-high fireplace with a grill. It was all we had hoped for. It was our Casa Canale for a month.

The decision had been made back in our New Jersey studio six months earlier on a cold rainy day in early spring. Over a lunch of cannelloni, we’d gotten into a long conversation about why Italian food tastes so damn delicious. We sat there for a couple of hours discussing it. We have both traveled extensively in Italy, eating in every region, and in one sense we really do know Italian food: We know that seppie (cuttlefish) is served with white polenta in the Veneto; that bread crumbs replace grated cheese in Sicily; and that in Genoa, only tiny, sweet Genovese basil is used to make pesto—leaves grown in warmer climes are deemed too aggressive in flavor. But the more you learn, the less you know. And we realized that for all the times we’d been to Italy, there was still so much we wanted to understand about Italian home cooking. By the end of lunch we had a plan. We’d go to Italy, find a house with a kitchen, and cook. We looked at each other and laughed, surprised that we could imagine doing such a thing. But that’s just what we did.

We are home cooks writing about home cooking for other home cooks. We celebrate cooking every day and especially during the festive holiday season with delicious Italian dishes, some classic, some reinterpreted Canal House style. We make tramezzini and tender spinach gnocchi, bathing them in a simple sage butter. We roll out sheets of pasta and layer them into rich, delicate lasagne. We simmer classic ragù Bolognese and serve it with wide ribbons of pappardelle. We roast game birds, stir up creamy risottos, slice porcini, char peppers, poach capons, and turn the beloved chestnut into sweets just right for the holidays.

Q&A with Amanda Hocking

Amanda Hocking is the best-selling author of the Trylle trilogy and six additional self-published novels.  Now signed with Macmillan, the newly edited version of Switched will be available in January, followed by Torn and Ascend in February and April. 

Amazon.com: Would you most closely define yourself as a geek, a dork, or a nerd?

Amanda Hocking: Geek.  I am a fangirl. Mostly of cult classics, ‘80s films, superheroes, obscure actors, one-hit-wonders, and bands popular in Australia. But I'm a fangirl about pretty much anything that catches my fancy.

Amazon.com: How did you feel when you sold your first book? 

Amanda Hocking: Ecstatic....It’s been amazing.

Amazon.com: Let’s future-talk.  What are your writing goals?

Amanda Hocking: My problem is that I no longer know what my goals are in terms of my writing career. I've already far surpassed my expectations. I don't know what's realistic for me to want or expect. Don't get me wrong. I'm thrilled and soooooo grateful for everything. I just don't know what's next.

Amazon.com: Do you have any advice for young writers? 

Amanda Hocking: Write a lot, but read even more. Learn to be open to criticism. And research as much as you can before making a decision about what you want [out of] your writing career....Be professional and polite always, even when people say they hate your book (and people will).

Amazon.com: You get so much fan mail and responses to your blog posts.  Does anything in particular stand out?

Amanda Hocking: I've gotten several emails from wives and mothers whose husbands are gone because they're soldiers and marines. Those ones I think really strike me the most. These people are sacrificing so much, and they're using something I wrote to escape for a minute. And that really puts the pressure on me to put out something that's worthy.

New to Kindle: Romance Books by Patricia Gaffney

Bestselling and award-winning romance author Patricia Gaffney knows a thing or two about writing great dialogue. The characters in her popular historical romance novels are widely praised for being thoughtful, spirited, and authentic. For Gaffney, the opportunity to voice these characters is one of the things she enjoys most about writing. “That’s also the fun of writing. You can think all day long for a zinger and it looks on the page as if it’s spontaneous.”

Here Patricia gives us some more insight into her writing process, sharing the inspiration behind a few of her most popular heroines and stories. Each of these ebooks is available now in the Kindle store.

 Lily

The Plot: On the run from a vengeful enemy, Lily Tremaine finds work as a maid at Darkstone Manor, where Devon Darkwell, the tortured, brooding master, rules over all.

The Inspiration: Gothic romances were a bit naughty when I was (very) young, so of course I was drawn to them. I loved the covers—often a fleeing, nightgowned heroine looking over her shoulder at a receding castle, which always had a flickering candle in one crenellated window. Lily is an updated take on the classic Gothic, set in the wilds of the Cornish moors and featuring a hero as hard as he is helpless before the heroine’s abiding goodness.

Fortune's Lady

The Plot: In London during the French Revolution, a British agent recruits a traitor’s daughter to infiltrate her father’s spy ring. 

The Inspiration: If you look past the 1790s London setting in Fortune’s Lady, you can see the bare bones of my favorite old movie, Notorious. I modeled Philip Riordan and Cassandra Merlin on the roles played by Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, two compelling people torn so poignantly between love and desire.

 

Another Eden

 The Plot: Sara Cochrane’s wealthy husband is a brute, but if she leaves him she’ll lose her little boy. While designing “Eden,” a fabulous Newport “cottage” for the Cochranes, architect Alex McKie falls deeply in love with sad, beautiful Sara. But he can’t have her without ruining her, and their forbidden love seems doomed.

The Backstory: Before Another Eden, all my heroines (except for one widow) were single ladies. For my fifth historical romance, I wanted to try something different. But just giving Sara a rotten husband wouldn’t have made things tough enough for her. I also set her down in a time period when transgressions against the social laws of the upper class were at their most harsh and arbitrary: New York City in the Gay ’90s. My writer’s goal was to try to capture some of the quiet passion and desperation in the Gilded Age novels of Edith Wharton, one of my favorite authors. Or maybe I just wanted to give Lily Bart (from The House of Mirth) a happy ending.

Sweet Everlasting

 The Plot: A young Philadelphia doctor moves to the country for his health, and a beautiful yet mysteriously mute local girl changes his life forever.

The Inspiration: This was a book from the heart. The setting is my little town (name changed) in Pennsylvania at the turn of the century. The heroine is an amateur naturalist, and the plot came to me on long walks in the woods with my dog. Sweet Everlasting is the beautiful name of a rather plain wildflower native to our area.

 

Crooked Hearts

The Plot: San Francisco in the 1890s: When two charming con artists team up to pull a sting on their dangerous mutual enemy, love sneaks up on their crooked hearts.

The Inspiration: I was flipping through TV channels and came across an old episode of Father Dowling, that 1990s mystery series about the priest and the nun who solve crimes. The nun character was talking to a gorgeous blind man, and I started playing the what if game. What if he doesn’t realize she’s a nun and he starts flirting with her? Better yet—what if he’s only pretending to be blind so he can flirt with her? Best of all—what if she’s only pretending to be a nun?! Crooked Hearts was born. I think it’s my funniest book.

Outlaw in Paradise

 The Plot: Paradise is a pretty little town on the Rogue River in 1880s Oregon. Cady McGill, who owns the saloon, dresses like a madam—but only because her customers expect it. One day Jesse Gault rides into town, dressed like a dangerous gunslinger—but only because the scam he’s working requires it. Will these two plucky survivors find each other, and true love, once their disguises come off?

The Inspiration: I had so much fun with Crooked Hearts, I couldn’t wait to try another humorous western. Calling on my vast scholarly background in old Gunsmoke episodes, I crafted a just-for-fun story of a fake outlaw and the saloon gal who falls for him. There’s even a quick-draw gunfight in the end, and everybody ends up with exactly what—and who—they deserve.

Guest Blogger: Jennifer Weiner

One of my favorite things as a reader is discovering – perhaps by reading a review, or seeing a movie, or via one of today’s newfangled methods, such as the one my Nanna calls The Twitter – a writer who, while not new, is new to me…and then gorging on everything he or she has ever written.

I found Harlan Coben, and his Myron Bolitar mysteries, that way, and it seemed like almost an embarrassment of riches when I could download enough titles to keep me happy for a month.

George R.R. Martin? I bought the first book in The Game of Thrones series when the HBO series debuted, and got hooked instantly. Unlike the people who’d been fans since Day One and had been waiting, with varying degrees of patience, for A Dance with Dragons to finally be published already, I could scoop up all five books in the series and spend all summer in Westeros, where dragons are raging, winter is coming, and a dwarf has emerged as an improbable hero.

I love hearing from readers who’ve been following me since my first book was published, in 2001…but I also like hearing from the ones who just found me, the ones who were, maybe, ten years old when Good in Bed was published, but are twenty-one now, and can have the experience that I’ve so enjoyed, of finding an author who speaks to you, who entertains and provokes you, who makes you laugh and makes you think, and finding out that she’s got not just one or two, but many books for you to enjoy.

I’m thrilled that my books are available in e-form, and I’m even happier that two of my favorites are on sale for the holidays for $5.99 each (until Jan. 2). Little Earthquakes, written in the months just after I became a mother, is the story of three new moms in Philadelphia, the struggles they face, the choices they make, and the monstrous mother-in-law who refuses to be called any variation of “grandma” and who dresses her new granddaughter in Bedazzled onesies that say “hottie.”

Best Friend's Forever features the girl you probably knew in high school, who spent her days permanently cringing, the one who was picked on, made fun of, the butt of every guy’s joke and every girl’s “there but for the grace of God.” What ever happened to that girl after graduation? Did things get better? Best Friend's Forever offers my best guess.

If you’ve read them already, now you can enjoy them in a new and portable form…or give them to someone who received a Kindle for the holidays. If you haven’t, here’s your chance to give them a try.

Happy reading!

"A Christmas Carol" Enhanced Edition

Mary Danby introduces the enhanced edition of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Read by his great-granddaughter Monica Dickens.

Charles Dickens was my great-great-grandfather. Monica Dickens, the best-selling author of more than 40 novels, was my much-loved aunt.

Monica was magic. To be around her was like wearing X-ray specs, because she helped you to see further into everything that was going on. With her journalist's eye she would point something out, or make a pithy comment or give you a greater understanding of a person. Her world was a colourful one, full of jokes and enthusiasm. Anyone meeting her would feel as though they were the one person she had been waiting to see.

Married to an American, she spent much of her life on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and it was from there that she founded the first branch of The Samaritans in the USA, which provides, amongst other community services, support groups for those who have lost someone to suicide.

Her great-grandfather was, in his time, the social conscience of the nation. Through his writing, people were made to consider the plight of the poor, the lonely, the social outcasts. A sentimental man, he felt keenly the predicaments of his fictional characters and often wept as he wrote.

Dickens toured Britain and the USA with a series of performances where he gave dramatic readings of his work. He played the parts of all the characters with such gusto that it is said he wore himself out and to some extent brought about his own death at the age of 58.

Christmas was a big event in the Dickens household, and one vital ingredient was Charles Dickens's reading of A Christmas Carol. Every year his children were privileged to hear from the author's mouth the story of how the bitter and stingy Ebenezer Scrooge is shown the error of his ways by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. Every nuance of description, every intonation of voice became as much a part of their Christmas as the plum pudding.

One of these children was Monica Dickens's grandfather, Henry Fielding Dickens, and when his family gathered for Christmas at his house in Chelsea he would continue the tradition of reading A Christmas Carol to all of them. Of course, he read it just as his father had done, and Monica from a young age could see in her mind's eye the great man himself as the tale of tragedy and redemption unfolded.

In the 1980s, a recording of Monica reading A Christmas Carol was made for a local US radio station and sold in aid of the Cape Cod Samaritans. Charles Dickens's own voice was, of course, never recorded, but his spirit surely shines through this moving audio, and Monica's humanitarian work continues with proceeds to benefit the Samaritan crisis lines.

 --Mary Danby

"Chronic Fear": A Thriller of Altered Memories and Minds ($2.99)

Guest post by Scott Nicholson

My thriller Liquid Fear is about the survivors of a secret clinical trial testing a fear-eliminating drug. Unbeknownst to the participants the experiment has never ended.

When I began writing the book I had a simple question in mind. What if we had a drug that helped people forget trauma? It would relieve thousands of soldiers who suffer lingering effects from combat missions. It could help car-accident victims, and victims of rape, and perhaps those plagued by memories of childhood abuse.

But bad memories are also useful. If we didn't remember that touching a hot stove burned our fingers, we might soon have charred black stumps on the ends of our arms.

And what if in the process of losing “bad memories” we also lost some “good memories”? What is our past, if not the sum of memories?

I've long been fascinated by ethical questions of counseling, psychiatry, and any pharmaceutical attempts to shape and “improve” human behavior. It's an easy leap to see how treatments designed for our own good can be manipulated toward a different goal—such as a conspiracy against the American people.

When I began researching post-traumatic stress disorder a few years back, I discovered the President's Council on Bioethics (the name has since changed). The council had debated the ethical issues of such treatments and rugs. While arriving at no single conclusion, it pointed out the slippery moral slope of selectively altering people's memories.

These issues are pretty hairy. Now imagine that outside agencies are making decisions about our mental state. Trusting a medical professional is risky enough, but what if that is extended to a pharmaceutical company's best interest? What if the best interest is a profit motive? What if it's a larger effort by a government or ideological movement?

What if even love is nothing but a tiny set of chemical responses that can be easily manipulated? What if faith could be erased with a pill and replaced by a different belief system?

If the power to change minds was readily available, wouldn't it naturally and ultimately end up in the hands of the most sociopathic? The idea chills me to the bone. So I rolled that paranoia into the thriller Liquid Fear.

Now the sequel to Liquid Fear is available. Chronic Fear, explores the meaning of identity and personal responsibility, as well as the spiritual aspects of identity.

Come along for a razor's-edge ride. I wouldn't want to take it alone.

Scott Nicholson is author of more than 20 books, including The Red Church, Disintegration, and Creative Spirit. Learn more about Scott at his Author Central page or on his website.

Guest Post: Aric Davis on "The Beast Within (Dead Man #7)"

Aric Davis is the author of A Good and Useful Hurt, a horror novel releasing in February, and the mystery Nickel Plated, which released earlier this year. Married with one daughter, Davis lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan where he has worked for the past 14 years as a body piercer.

The Beast Within (Dead Man #7), by James Daniels, is a quirky ride through Northern Michigan, following protagonist Matt Cahill on yet another totally insane and violently fun adventure in this seventh book in the Dead Man series.

After meeting and then defending a beautiful woman named Roma from a gang of thugs, Matt is brought to the home she shares with her husband, brothers, and legion of secrets. Finding himself caught in the middle of a Neo-Nazi civil war between different factions of the Michigan Militia, Matt is forced to not only pick sides, but also to deal with his own demons.

The Beast Within never comes close to answering all of the questions the reader may ask of it, nor does it need to. Mr. Daniels has written a book that compares favorably to a 1980's action film, and just like those Hollywood hits, this book comes out swinging and never stops driving for the fences, even in the face of reason. Hilariously funny at times, and weird enough to remind the reader of southern fried author Joe R. Lansdale, this is a book that is not afraid to be violent, grotesque, or even a little bit sappy.

If you're the type of reader that likes the guns blazing, women gorgeous, and blood all but dripping from the pages, this was written with you in mind.

The purpose of these novels has been described by series creator's Lee Goldberg and William Rabkin as being, "the male equivalent of harlequin romance." At this task The Beast Within succeeds wonderfully, and one can only hope that the series will continue this trend of hard-hitting, fast-paced, eminently entertaining books, typically for the kind of audience that doesn't mind dog earring a book or stuffing it in their back pocket, even if they've long ago graduated from turgid paperbacks to an Amazon Kindle.

--Aric Davis