Kindle Daily Post

Iris Johansen's Explosive New Thriller

From best-selling author Iris Johansen is the gripping, action-packed crime drama, What Doesn't Kill You. The novel features femme fatale Catherine Ling, a character Johansen first introduced in 2010's Chasing the Night.

In Chasing the Night, we follow Ling, a CIA agent, as she continues her eight-year struggle to find her son, the victim of a kidnapping when he was only two. Her friends, family, and colleagues tell her to let go, move on, and accept that her son is never coming back, but Ling refuses. Instead, she finds help in Eve Duncan, a forensic sculptor whose own parental nightmare, the disappearance of her daughter, has engulfed her in a similar obsession.

Together, the women endure the worst fear any mother can imagine. Without question, Chasing the Night is a gut-wrenching thrill-ride into the darkest places of the soul.

In What Doesn't Kill You, Johansen continues her exploration of Ling's skills and psyche by going deeper into her background. Abandoned on the streets of Hong Kong at age four, Ling was schooled in the art of survival, and she traded in the only commodity she had: information. As a teenager, Ling came under the tutelage of a mysterious man known only as Hu Chang, a skilled assassin and master poisoner.

With such a deadly and anonymous background, the CIA recruits Ling and trains her to become one of their most effective operatives. However, having lived life in the shadows, Ling is aware of the wobbly moral compass of her existence. She's even more aware of how expendable she is to the shadowy power brokers Ling deals with.

When her old friend Hu Chang creates an incredibly deadly and completely untraceable poison, the chase is on to be the first to get it. With rogue operative John Gallo also on the hunt, Ling finds herself pitted against a group so villainous and a man so evil that she may not survive the quest to protect those she cares about.

No doubt about it, What Doesn't Kill You showcases Iris Johansen at her page-turning best.

Iris Johansen is the best-selling author of Pandora's Daughter, Stalemate, Killer Dreams, On the Run, and many more. Her latest novel, What Doesn't Kill You,is also a best-selling thriller, and Johansen has already announced plans to bring Catherine Ling back in future books.

"Running with Scissors": One Hilarious and Horrific Memoir

In Running with Scissors, author Augusten Burroughs gives an equally hilarious and horrific tour of his nearly unbelievable world as his family disintegrates and his boyhood slides into a surreal and grotesque version of the American dream. After his mother, a delusional poet suffering from mental illness, and his alcoholic father end their chaotic marriage, Augusten's mother gives him away to be raised by her psychiatrist.

This is how, at age 12, Augusten found himself in a dilapidated Victorian in Northampton, Massachusetts, living in perfect squalor with an egomaniac doctor that was a dead-ringer for Santa Claus and a lunatic to boot. Most of Running with Scissors chronicles Augusten's teenage years spent with the psychiatrist's bizarre family that also included a few other patients. Augusten's pathos-drenched stories are seasoned with riotous, self-deprecating humor, even the sexually explicit ones where he describes his relationship with a man 20 years his senior.

In this environment, there were no rules, and there was no school. The Christmas tree stayed up until summer, and Valium was eaten like Pez. When things got dull, there was always the vintage electroshock therapy machine under the stairs, just waiting to be fired up.

Burroughs roles through his anecdotes with a peerless comic timing meshed with the witty, truthful observations of a child. His writing promises to have you laughing at, while simultaneously recoiling from, the horrors of his youth. Above all, Running with Scissors is an ordinary boy's survival chronicle of extraordinary circumstances. Ranging from foul and harrowing to compelling and maniacally funny, this is a rare, oddly-shaped gem shining out from the crowded memoir shelves.

Augusten's writing has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers around the world including The New York Times and New York Magazine. In 2005, Entertainment Weekly named him one of “The 25 Funniest People in America.”

His latest work, This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike, is a bare-knuckled, no-holds-barred self-help book and an Amazon Best of the Month pick for May, 2012.

Top 10 Kindle Books for May

 

May's editors' picks include new books from iconic American novelists John Irving and Toni Morrison, plus more great new novels and nonfiction from established writers and newcomers alike.

 

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain

Poignant, funny, and heartbreaking, the new novel from this winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and the O. Henry Prize is being called "the Catch-22 of the Iraq War."

 

 

 In One Person by John Irving

A compelling story of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, John Irving's newest novel explores unfulfilled love--tormented, funny, and affecting--and the impassioned embrace of our differences.

 

An Uncommon Education by Elizabeth Percer

A young woman tries to save three people she loves in this insightful coming-of-age debut, which artfully captures the complicated ties of family, the inevitability of loss, and the importance of learning to let go.

 

The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro

The fourth book of the monumental "Years of Lyndon Johnson" series displays all the narrative energy and insight that has led to its being hailed as among "the truly great political biographies of the modern age."

 

Home by Toni Morrison

In Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison's newest novel, an angry and self-loathing Korean War veteran is back in racist America after enduring trauma that left him with more than just physical scars.

 

Season of the Witch by David Talbot

Best-selling author David Talbot's gripping story of San Francisco examines the turbulent years between 1967 and 1982 and the men and women who led to the city's rebirth.

 

 

Trapeze by Simon Mawer

Out of school and helping the British war effort, Marian Sutro goes to WWII Paris to persuade a friend--a research physicist--to join the Allies. The outcome could affect the course of the war.

 

 

This Is How by Augusten Burroughs

With black humor and in-your-face advice, best-selling author Augusten Burroughs challenges the notion of self-help books with a "proven aid in overcoming shyness... spinsterhood, grief, disease, lushery, decrepitude & more."

 

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll

In a narrative driven by larger-than-life characters, Steve Coll investigates the largest and most powerful private corporation in the United States and Big Oil's place in American politics and foreign policy.

 

I Suck at Girls by Justin Halpern

Fans of the best-selling Sh*t My Dad Says will recognize the always patient voice of Justin Halpern's dad as it crackles through the pages of this hysterical new quasi-memoir.

The 2012 Pulitzer Prize Winners

Yesterday, the 2012 Pulitzer prizewinners and nominated finalists were announced. Since 1917, the awards have honored the top journalists, photojournalists, writers, poets, cartoonists and composers working in the United States. Here's how this year's awards were distributed:

 

LETTERS, DRAMA and MUSIC

Fiction – No award. As pointed out by our friends at Omnivoracious, maybe we should consider it a tie. Last year's winner was Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad. This year's three-way-tie finalists were Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, and The Pale King by David Foster Wallace.

Drama - Water by the Spoonful by Quiara Alegría Hudes

History - Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by the late Manning Marable

Biography - George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis

Poetry - Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith

General Nonfiction - The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

Music - Silent Night: Opera in Two Acts by Kevin Puts

 

JOURNALISM

Public Service - The Philadelphia Inquirer

Breaking News Reporting - The Tuscaloosa (Ala.) News Staff

Investigative Reporting - Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eileen Sullivan and Chris Hawley of the Associated Press and Michael J. Berens and Ken Armstrong of The Seattle Times

Explanatory Reporting - David Kocieniewski of The New York Times

Local Reporting - Sara Ganim and members of The Patriot-News Staff, Harrisburg, Penn

National Reporting - David Wood of The Huffington Post. First published as a 10-part series, Wood's 2012 Pulitzer Prize stories documenting the struggles of severely wounded veterans are available in Beyond the Battlefield: The War Goes on for the Severely Wounded, which includes photography and graphics from the original series as well as a forward and several new chapters.

International Reporting - Jeffrey Gettleman of The New York Times

Feature Writing - Eli Sanders of The Stranger, a Seattle (Wash.) weekly

Commentary - Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune

Criticism -Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe

Editorial Writing - No award

Editorial Cartooning - Matt Wuerker of POLITICO

Breaking News Photography - Massoud Hossaini of Agence France-Presse

Feature Photography - Craig F. Walker of The Denver Post

March's Kindle Books for $3.99 or Less

It's time to celebrate the change of seasons with a fresh list of 100 Kindle Books for $3.99 or Less. Here are some of our favorites from this month's selection:

 

Under the March Sun: The Story of Spring Training by Charles Fountain, $1.99

Spring training, baseball's annual six-week ritual, dates back nearly 150 years. In this fascinating history, the full history of spring training is revealed for the first time: from its start as a shoestring-budget road trip to burn off winter calories to today's billion-dollar-a-year business surrounding the Grapefruit and Cactus leagues of Florida and Arizona.

 

A Little Death In Dixie by Lisa Turner, $2.99

Rich with the atmosphere of the American South, this expertly plotted suspense novel tracks Detective Billy Able as he works to uncover why one of Memphis' most seductive and notorious socialites has vanished. What starts as ordinary procedural work for Able soon morphs into a twisted trail of corruption, tragedy, and disturbing truths.

 

The Crossroads Café by Deborah Smith, $1.99

This sophisticated and poignant romance follows a beautiful Hollywood actress's escape to a secluded mountain cabin in North Carolina. A car accident has left her severely scarred, but in the Appalachians she finds unexpected love with a man who lost his family in 9-11.

 

I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi, $2.24

Written with refreshing irreverence, Ramit Sethi's six-week personal finance program takes a practical approach with a nonjudgmental style. The book's core centers around the four pillars of personal finance—banking, saving, budgeting, and investing—as well as the wealth-building ideas of entrepreneurship.

 

Born at Midnight (Shadow Falls) by C. C. Hunter, $2.99

After mixing with the wrong crowd, Kylie Galen gets sent to Shadow Falls camp by her mother. Kylie discovers her fellow campers aren't just "troubled," they're supernatural. The first book of this richly imagined young-adult fantasy series is filled with humor, teen angst, and a good dose of romance.

 

Be sure to browse through March's complete list of 100 Kindle Books for $3.99 or Less. We've taken care to select something for everybody, including taut thrillers, engaging romances, inspiring biographies, well-crafted cookbooks, and histories covering everything from Abraham Lincoln to the legendary punk band Black Flag.

 

Note: Deals expire on the last day of each month. Individual books may have additional territory restrictions, and not all deals are available in all territories.

Top 10 Kindle Books for March

From Theodore Roosevelt's quest to clean up sin-soaked New York City to the travails of a Tokyo pickpocket, our editors' selections for the Best Books of March features engaging nonfiction, imaginative new novels, and a moving short story collection.

 

The Vanishers by Heidi Julavits
A paranormal detective story, an affecting exposition of familial and female dynamics, and a hilarious satire of academic politics: Heidi Julavits has crafted an ambitious and strange novel.

 

 

Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt's Doomed Quest to Clean Up ... New York by Richard Zacks
Overrun with gambling and bootleg liquor, NYC was known as the "Island of Vice." Zacks's fun, enthusiastic style makes this well-researched history memorable.

 

 

Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan
Looping from Nazi-occupied Europe to modern-day Baltimore and back, Esi Edugyan's Giller Prize winner is an electrifying, musical novel about racism and what we're willing to surrender for love and art.

 

 

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
Betrayal, ardor, war, and prophecies... Author Madeline Miller gathers to love about Homer's "Iliad" without the labor of epic poetry, resulting in an absorbing, gratifyingly modern story.

 

 

The Thief by Fuminori Nakamura
Nakamura's protagonist weaves through the streets of Tokyo, pickpocketing his way through the flow of humanity, but the thief begins to realize a noose is being drawn around his neck.

 

 

Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer
Combining cutting-edge neurological research with the age-old mystery of how and when inspiration strikes, Jonah Lehrer crafts a fun and engaging study of creativity.

 

 

Wild by Cheryl Strayed
At 26, following the death of her mother, divorce, and a run of reckless behavior, Cheryl Strayed found herself embarking on a solo thru-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail. It's a well-balanced wilderness tale and personal-redemption memoir.

 

 

The Reconstructionist by Nick Arvin
Ellis Barstow, whose brother died young in a car crash, makes a living conducting auto accident postmortems. In love with his boss's wife, Ellis' brother's high school girlfriend, Ellis seeks answers to his brother's death.

 

 

White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf by Aaron Bobrow-Strain
Over the last hundred years, bread has gone from cure-all to fluff, and every place in between: this is table-bread's true story.

 

 

Birds of a Lesser Paradise by Megan Mayhew Bergman
This collection of stories constructs a world filled with nature and family who hate and love and mostly need one another, each satisfying in a way short fiction rarely does.

Editors' Picks: February

 

Before the calendar turns, we wanted to give you a final look at our editors' picks for the Best Books of February. Here are a handful from the list, which includes debut novels, eye-opening nonfiction titles, and a suspenseful legal mystery:

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo 

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Katherine Boo's landmark work of narrative nonfiction tells the dramatic, and sometimes heartbreaking, story of families striving toward a better life while taking up residence in the slum-shadows of one of the twenty-first century’s great, unequal cities: Mumbai, India.

 

Defending Jacob: A Novel by William Landay 

When a shocking crime shatters Andy Barber's happy life, the assistant district attorney is blindsided by what happens next: His fourteen-year-old son is charged with the murder of a fellow student. It's a suspenseful, character-driven mystery and a spellbinding tale of guilt, betrayal, and losing control.

 

A Good American by Alex George 

When Frederick and Jette flee her disapproving mother in 1904 by traveling to America, they find themselves in the small town of Beatrice, Missouri, not speaking a word of English and meeting characters ranging from a gumbo-cooking jazz trumpeter to a malevolent, bicycle-riding dwarf. Poignant, funny, and heartbreaking, it's a novel centered on the universal story about the search for home.

 

Flatscreen: A Novel by Adam Wilson 

Eli Schwartz as has endured the loss of his home, the indifference of his parents, the success of his older brother, and the frequent dismissal of women. A classic loser, Eli strikes up a dangerous friendship with a former TV star, now current paraplegic sex addict, that descends into utter debasement and YouTube stardom. Adam Wilson writes heart-moving mischief in this wondrous debut of a truth-telling comic voice.

 

The Snow Child: A Novel by Eowyn Ivey 

Alaska, 1920, is a brutal place to homestead, especially for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless; they are drifting apart, but in a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, the couple build a child out of snow. Come dawn, the snow child is gone, but Jack and Mabel glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. Jack and Mabel come to love this strange child, Faina, as their own, and what they eventually learn about her will transform all of them.

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

Best Books of 2011: Kindle Singles

In the ten months since our launch in January, we've published Kindle Singles by this diverse subset of the world writing community:

-- Five Pulitzer Prize winners, and two finalists; two winners of the Tony Award for best drama, and three National Magazine Award winners

-- A movie blogger in Lansing, Michigan

-- Three current and two former New York Times reporters

-- The bouncer at Beauty Bar on West 14th Street in Manhattan

-- An executive vice president of CBS Corporation

-- An office temp at the Hunter College admissions department

-- The guy who wrote the music for David Lynch's Blue Velvet

-- A patient in the psych ward at Bellevue Hospital

-- STEPHEN KING!

-- A high-school history teacher

Our contributors range in age from 23 to 86 years old, and more than a dozen of them landed on our doorstep via a blind email to kindle-singles@amazon.com--including the distinguished nonfiction author Ted Conover (who gave us The Fair Ophelia) and former Reed College president  James Lawrence Powell (author of 2084 and Rough Winds). Others answered our call, including such literary luminaries as Christopher Hitchens, Susan Orlean, Tom Rachman, and David Rabe. Memoirs from  Project Runway co-host Tim Gunn, Bergdorf Blondes author Plum Sykes, and Christina Nehring, author of A Vindication of Love, also graced our storefront.

We're especially happy to have welcomed fresh voices into a world of shrinking opportunities for unknown writers. We've opened our doors to anyone with a great idea and raw talent, posting work from rising stars like 26-year-old Mother Jones intern Rebecca Huval, 30-year-old former Village Voice staff writer Mara Altman, and Erik German, a 32-year-old correspondent for The Daily--all of whom delivered powerful emotional narratives drawn from personal experience and reporting. It has also given us access to the nonfiction storytelling gifts of seasoned talents like Cecelia Holland, author of Blood on the Tracks, and the great filmmaker/playwright Frank D. Gilroy--who began writing his extraordinary Kindle Single, Lake, while directing a movie in Paris in 1968.

It's hard to choose ten Kindle Singles as the Best of 2011 from the hundred-plus we've posted since our launch last January.  And we're likely to add a couple dozen more before the year is done. But these ten Kindle Singles represent a powerful cross-section of style and substance and make us feel as though our slightly cumbersome slogan-- "Compelling Ideas Expressed at Their Natural Length"--might just make perfect sense.

Check out the Best Kindle Singles of 2011.

The Best Books of 2011

So many books. So many choices. It's not easy putting together a list of the year's best books, but we've held many meetings and votes, we’ve pored over the books and occasionally poured our hearts out to compile our picks from a year's worth of enthusiastic and very enjoyable reading. Our Best Books of 2011 Store features the 100 Best Books of the Year, plus Top 10 lists in the following categories:

 

 

 

The Art of Fielding: #1 in Literature & Fiction
Debut novelist Chad Harbach explores the unpredictable forces that complicate relationships in our favorite literary novel of the year.
› See the Top 10 list

Before I Go to Sleep: #1 in Mystery & Thrillers
Every day Christine wakes up not knowing where she is. Her memories disappear every time she falls asleep, and her husband Ben is a stranger to her. Such suspenseful plots abound in our 10 favorite mysteries and thrillers.
› See the Top 10 list

Silk Is for Seduction: #1 in Romance
Loretta Chase's refreshingly original tale of a seamstress who snags a duke tops our list of the best romance novels of 2011.
› See the Top 10 list

Ready Player One: #1 in Science Fiction & Fantasy
Ernest Cline's hilarious and poignant homage to video games and 1980s pop culture heads up our list of the best science-fiction and fantasy books.
› See the Top 10 list

Steve Jobs: #1 in Biographies & Memoir
Walter Isaacson's timely and complete portrait of visionary innovator and technologist Steve Jobs caps our list of the best biographies and memoirs.
› See the Top 10 list
   

In the Plex: #1 in Business & Investing
Ever wonder "how Google thinks, works, and shapes our lives?" Journalist Steven Levy found out, and the result is our favorite business book of the year.
› See the Top 10 list
   
Blood, Bones & Butter: #1 in Cooking, Food & Wine
Delectable, dripping with flavor, and tinged with adrenaline and years of too-little sleep, Gabrielle Hamilton's stunning memoir offers this year's best book for food enthusiasts.
› See the Top 10 list
   
Fire Season: #1 in Outdoors & Nature
Our favorite book about the great outdoors? Philip Connors's spare and absorbing account of almost a decade of summers spent as a fire lookout in the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico.
› See the Top 10 list
   
In the Garden of Beasts: #1 in History
Leading our history list, Erik Larson has crafted a gripping, deeply-intimate narrative with a climax that reads like the best political thrillers.
› See the Top 10 list
   
The Information: #1 in Science
Popular science books don't get much better than James Gleick's definitive history of information, which covers a breathtaking range of topics from music and quantum mechanics to why forgetting takes work. And that's just the first book on this year's science list.
› See the Top 10 list

 

Browse our Best Books of 2011 Store for even more categories, including the 10 Best Kindle Singles of 2011. Meanwhile, share more great reading leads in the comments section below: What were your favorites new books this year? Who's the most exciting new author you discovered in 2011?

Whatever you read, have a great weekend reading!

     --Jason Kirk

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