Kindle Daily Post

Guest Blogger: Garry Trudeau, Creator of the Comic Strip, "Doonesbury"

G. B. Trudeau's Doonesbury has tracked and explored 40 years of American culture through six wars and eight presidential administrations. Now, we're excited to announce that you can enjoy this beloved comic strip on Kindle Fire.

When 40 was published in print form in 2010, the book tipped the scales at just under 10 pounds. The sheer heft of it, along with the sturdy slipcover; the fine, coated stock; and an unusually intoxicating new-book smell, commanded attention. And when a trailer truck packed with 1,300 copies was hijacked during a cross-country run, I was secretly thrilled that discerning thieves had thought 40 worthy of a heist—and that the book would soon be showing up on the street at people’s prices.

No such luck. The unloaded truck was eventually located on an interstate off-ramp, presumably abandoned in disgust. I’ve tried to imagine the reaction of the hijackers’ supervisor when he broke into the trailer and discovered 13,000 pounds of Doonesbury where palettes of hi-def TVs should have been. Let us hope no one was hurt; it was an honest mistake.

Still, after all that excitement, you’d think that the digital reimagining of 40 would be a letdown. Not so; we can now invite more people to the party. I’ve come to appreciate that many readers prefer to forego the risk of herniation while picking up a book—no matter that the risk is slight if you push up from your knees and have someone spot you. There was also the problem of where to display the book once consumed, as standard bookshelves could not accommodate it. We briefly considered shrink-wrapping it with four attachable legs, but then worried it might bump us into Amazon’s Home and Kitchen category.

Clearly the answer lay in rendering the collection in ones and zeros. And to further facilitate the reader experience, we divided the book into four easy pieces—each covering a full decade’s worth of strips. Everyone has a favorite decade, although let’s face it, it’s never the ’70s. Especially in my case. Not to wave the reader off, but my opening decade was filled with the uncertain stops and starts of a rank amateur learning his craft in full public view. I was wildly unready, but as the syndicate salesmen assured me, that was the point. The young had hijacked the culture, and with that standing, our voices—raw, impassioned, ungovernable—were in high demand.

Besides, all journeys need a beginning, and the early wheel-spinning is part of the fun. To paraphrase the Dead, it’s been a long, strange strip, and if 40 comprises the long of it, it ought to retain the strange as well.

--Garry Trudeau

Macbeth: A Novel: Lush in Tone and Language, Rich in Imagery

Here, Deborah Reed, author of Carry Yourself Back to Me and the thriller A Small Fortune written under the name Audrey Braun, reviews Macbeth: A Novel—a gripping contemporary prose by A. J. Hartley and David Hewson.

Novelists have often borrowed templates of Shakespeare’s work to create contemporary stories of their own, though not many are willing or possess the skills to overtly novelize a Shakespeare play. But A. J. Hartley and David Hewson have dozens of bestselling novels between them, written in nearly as many genres, and with Hartley’s background as a Shakespeare scholar, who better than these two writers to succeed at such a bold undertaking?

From the very first page of Macbeth: A Novel I realized Hartley and Hewson hadn’t just written a padded translation of the play but a fully realized novel, lush in tone and language, rich in imagery. Perhaps more importantly, they have transformed Shakespeare’s characters from vessels for ideas to human beings—sentient and crackling with passion and blood. It is not an easy task to breathe new and nuanced complications into characters that have existed for readers and audiences for centuries, but the authors succeed brilliantly. They have rendered Macbeth’s entire cast more sympathetic by affording them inner lives, making clear their motivations, and allowing us to feel their intentions, desires, doubts, and the ultimate pain of their demise. The story becomes more character driven, though the intense and clever plot is never far behind, which makes Macbeth: A Novel the perfect page-turner.

As a writer myself, I’m particularly sensitive to the nuance of speech, and I half expected to find the novel’s dialogue forced, copied over from the play, where it is meant to be spoken by live actors. But the dialogue not only remains true to the play, it is woven into the novel as if it had been written only for that purpose. For example, this original line by Macbeth: “I am in blood / Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more /  Returning were as tedious as go o’er,” in the novel becomes, “I am so far steeped in blood that if I chose to wade no further, then returning would be as bloody as to proceed.” Zing! The authors achieve these perfect translations, one after the other.

I’m guessing fans of Shakespeare will come to the novel with their own set of skepticisms, perhaps questioning the fidelity to the original play. But as the authors point out in their authors’ notes, Shakespeare himself drew from other sources to evoke higher truths, with most of his plays based on real life events and people. The original Macbeth is not a historical account of eleventh century Scotland, even if it is often interpreted as such. In truth, the play is a depiction of humanity set against the backdrop of Scotland, a story that reaches across time and space with its themes of greed, tragedy, morality, power, death, war, and love.

Macbeth: A Novel repurposes an age-old tale to portray secrets within secrets, leading to tragedies based on misunderstandings, missed opportunities, and perhaps, above all, vulnerabilities. Good people with the best intentions give in to desires and greed and then try to right all their wrongs by stumbling over their own mistakes. In the novel, Lady Macbeth becomes a complicated, nuanced, fully realized woman, her hand forced in many ways, life and death decisions based on her own pain, and on the deep love she has for her husband and country. The novel brings vision and nuance where none had existed, due to the limitations of playwriting. The novelists use introspection to reveal the depth of motivations behind the Macbeths, and in turn shine a fairer light so that we understand how the couple came to make that first fatal mistake and how they privately endured their sins begetting misery, begetting more misery, until death became their only escape.

Filmmaker Tim Burton comes to mind, the way he adapts classic tales by layering them in raucous bands of an even darker, twisted skin. Hartley and Hewson have done the same here with their sensual and vulgar witches, bloodthirsty wars, and highly charged sex scenes. But perhaps most of all, they have succeeded in depicting the intense and mysterious love between husband and wife, as fickle as patriotism in all its wonder, glory, and misfortune. Gentlemen, take a bow.

Meet Sgt. Tom Wade, a Western Character in an Industrial Wasteland

Guest post by Lee Goldberg, whose novel, King City, came out this week.

I broke both of my arms in a bad accident a few years ago. Part of my recovery involved having my rebuilt right arm strapped into a nasty device from the Tower of London collection that bent and extended my arm for hours each day. During that time, I watched hundreds of hours of Gunsmoke reruns and was surprised by how much I enjoyed following stoic, leather-skinned Marshal Matt Dillon bring order, and sometimes justice, to lawless Dodge City.

Matt Dillon truly lessened my pain. There’s just something about westerns, about the simple concept and mythic characters of Gunsmoke in particular, that’s inherently compelling and deeply satisfying. I wondered what it was, and if I could capture it in a crime novel. So I studied the show and scores of classic western movies.

I discovered that it’s a lot more than just giving a guy a Stetson, a badge, and a gun.

A western puts a man in a lawless, unforgiving, brutal frontier, where he must somehow survive by living off the land, his wits, and his own rigid code. It’s that last bit, I think, that is the core of it all: a personal code of conduct that’s constantly, relentlessly, put to the test.

A true western character ultimately prevails against adversity because of a stubborn, unwavering faith in his own convictions and the righteousness of his cause, a determination to see the world shaped the way he wants it to be, rather than let himself be shaped by it. He doesn’t try to explain or justify himself because it’s pointless. His actions speak for him.

And as iconic and old-fashioned as that all may be, it’s so refreshing in a world where everyone, particularly heroes in crime fiction, are so self-aware and self-obsessed, so eager to accept the moral, ethical, professional, legal ambiguities in a situation rather than take a principled stand on something, regardless of whether it’s right or wrong to everyone else.

That led me to write King City, and to create Sgt. Tom Wade, a man of principle, whose values may be laudable but whose maddening, unwavering loyalty to them costs him almost everything and everyone that he cares about. He’s not out on the western frontier, but exiled to the worst part of a once great industrial city, where he is out-numbered and out-gunned, and must enforce the law on little more than sheer strength of will.

Viewing the tropes and clichés of a modern crime novel through the prism of a western gave me a fresh perspective on the genre that made the book a pleasure to write and, I hope, for you to read.

Guest Blogger: Deborah Camp on Why Cowboys Have Always Been Her Heroes

One of the things I love most about cowboys is that they never totally fall out of favor. Oh, there might be times when they aren’t seen as often on television and the movies, but they are always a part of America like Mom and apple pie.

That’s probably why my romance novels have held up so well over the years. Most of my historical romances have cowboys as heroes. Cowboys figure prominently in my contemporary romances, too. Although the contemporary hero might not be an actual cowboy, he possesses the cowboy spirit – that swaggering, wide-shouldered, crooked smile kind of charisma that is instantly recognizable even if he happens to be wearing a tuxedo.

When Amazon opted to offer my novels for the Kindle format, I began sorting through my past titles. It was then that I realized that the tales were evergreen, just like the heroes and heroines. Today’s readers will become as immersed in the tales of love, loss, danger, drama, and desire as those who read them when they were originally published. That’s because love, like cowboys, is never boring or trite.

I grouped the novels so that they would be easier for readers to know what was in store for them. Some are sweet romances, brimming with sexual tension and bubbling desire (i.e. This Tender Truce, Devil’s Bargain) and others deal with more mature, sexier couples (i.e. Taming the Wild Man, Oklahoma Man). If you like romances that also include adventure, several of my novels will fit that bill (i.e. Just Another Pretty Face, Black-eyed Susan, Vein of Gold) and if love and danger get your pulse racing, I have some titles that will keep you turning the pages (i.e. Master of Moonspell, Fire Lily, Fallen Angel). Do you like to read romances that tickle your funny bone? Several of the Amazon Kindle titles will make you smile and maybe even giggle (i.e. The Butler Did It, Hook, Line, and Sinker, Primrose).

Although I am proud of each and every novel, I must confess I have a soft spot for the ones set in the west. I love stories that center on tough-skinned, tender-hearted men and women who are absolutely their equals. Women have struggled with unfair advantages throughout the ages and I love to write stories about females who refuse to be restricted or denied. Strong women need strong men and they don’t come any stronger than those range-riding, bronc-busting, iron-jawed men of the Wild West.

I hope you enjoy reading these novels as much as I did creating them. Please drop me a line on Amazon or Facebook and let me know which ones touched you, made you smile, or awakened in you that primal appreciation for a man in a cowboy hat and chaps.

--Deborah Camp

Guest Blogger: Buzz Bissinger on Why He Wrote "Friday Night Lights"

H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the best-selling Friday Night Lights. He is also a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a columnist for The Daily Beast.

Several months ago, Boobie Miles called me and said: “I’m getting old, Buzz. These old bones. I’m gettin’ old.”

I worried when he said that--the resignation in his voice. How could he not forever be the kid I’d first met when I was reporting Friday Night Lights, back in 1988, running in that stadium in West Texas,  an eighteen-year-old with the wind at his back?

Now he was forty-one and facing his mortality, just as I was facing mine.

                                 *  *  *

What could have been? The question became moot on that tragic August day in 1988 at Jones Stadium, in Lubbock,  when he blew out his knee and the promise of his career with it. 

So when I heard Boobie’s voice those months ago, I wondered whether he would ever truly make peace with what happened to him. We all have faced that moment of clarity in which you realize you’ll never be what you imagined. We normally face it in middle age.

But Boobie has been facing the question of what-if since he was eighteen. Sometimes he feels used by me, and at those times he hates Friday Night Lights. Just as I sometimes hate it for how it trapped us both in a story that forever defined us too young.

But for all of its tragedy, life can also be wonderfully serendipitous. It was in the ashes of Boobie’s injury that he and I found each other. He needed someone in his life after his beloved uncle died; I became that person.

I never imagined this would happen--my Sundays as a child in New York spent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with my parents, staring at paintings I did not understand but pretended I did; his Sundays in West Texas tied to a dresser and beaten with a belt until he was dumped into a foster home.

                                                                    *  *  *

Boobie helps me to see that lasting love can come from anywhere.

Never when I was first writing Friday Night Lights did I think I would say to him what I said the other day,  what we say to each other at the end of nearly every conversation we’ve had over the years:

“I love you, Boobie.”

“I love you, too. Buzz.” 

After Friday Night Lights is the story of how we came to those words.

--Buzz Bissinger

Reviving the Tired Boxing Metaphor

Guest post by Tom Schreck, whose novel, The Vegas Knockout, came out this week. 

I hate clichés, especially boxing clichés. These days, boxing in popular media is one tired cliché after another:               

• On the Waterfront: “I coulda been a contender.”
• Rocky: “Yo Adrienne!” and “Cut me, Mick.”
• Raging Bull: “Did you f*ck my wife?”

The cliché fighter is either the arrogant, grandiose, self-absorbed champion or the underachieving, sad sack whose life is filled with bad breaks. He (or now, she, thanks to Million Dollar Baby) is filled with out-of-the-ring demons. These clichés paint too narrow a picture of what boxing is really about.  

I love boxing. Besides being a writer, I also work in the fight game as a judge and I’m still a gym rat who regularly gets in the ring. Boxing is in my blood. I spend a good percentage of my discretionary time in boxing gyms and very few, if any, boxers fit the cliché descriptions.

In my new book, The Vegas Knockout, my protagonist, Duffy Dombrowski, is anything but the cliché. Here’s why:

• Duffy is a social worker fighter. Ninety-nine percent of professionals box as a second job.
• Duffy has more than one dimension just like the real-life fighters I know. Fighting is not who he is, it is what he does.
• If he takes a shot in the face, he feels it, unlike LaMotta or Balboa.
• Boxing lets him forget about his demons just for the moments he is in the ring, not exorcise them.
• Duffy is thoughtful, insightful and often lonely both in and out of the ring.
• Boxing is about facing what’s scary and keeping on when it isn’t easy. He doesn’t win every fight.
• Most fighters never get to fight for a title, and Duffy certainly doesn’t, but getting the opportunity to spar with a contender is almost as good.
• Many times the expectation is for Duffy to lose a fight without looking too bad. In the boxing world that’s known as a professional opponent. You can make a decent living just losing and looking good.

Boxing isn’t always easy. Sometimes a fighter needs to find other ways to get some wins in life. Maybe that’s why Duffy sticks his nose in other people’s business and puts himself in harm’s way. Maybe he’s just evening the score, or maybe that’s just the way he is.

Q&A with S.E. Hinton, author of "The Outsiders"

Ponyboy can count on his brothers and his friends, but not on much else besides trouble with the Socs, a vicious gang of rich kids who get away with everything, including beating up greasers like Ponyboy. At least he knows what to expect--until the night someone takes things too far.

Written forty-five years ago, S. E. Hinton's classic The Outsiders--a story of a boy who finds himself on the outskirts of regular society--remains as powerful today as it was the day it was written.

Amazon.com: What does this anniversary mean to you as an author?

S.E. Hinton: It has been amazing to see my first novel stand the test of time--to go from a teen-age wonder to an old lady of letters.

Amazon.com: How does it make you feel that kids all over the country are reading your book?

S.E. Hinton: Since so many kids write me to tell me The Outsiders is the first book they enjoyed reading, and so many teachers tell me it is a pleasure to teach a book that will engage their students, I'm glad to be of help. Reading has been a major influence on my life.

Amazon.com: You were obviously a very talented writer at a very young age. What were other kids your age doing at the time you wrote The Outsiders?

S.E. Hinton: Hanging out, driving around aimlessly, enjoyable activities but I would rather be writing.

Amazon.com: What types of things were you reading/watching/listening to as you wrote The Outsiders?

S.E. Hinton: I prefer absolute quiet while writing.

Amazon.com: Who was the first person, other than yourself, to read The Outsiders? What did they think?

S.E. Hinton: Some friends. They thought it was cool. Especially since I bought a car with the advance.

Amazon.com: What do you hope kids learn from reading your book?

S.E. Hinton: To see the "other" as a person, too, to think before they judge.

Amazon.com: In The Outsiders, you write about two groups: the greasers and the socials. If one didn’t belong on either side, where would they fall in society?

S.E. Hinton: Everyone had their own little group. The novel would be the size of a telephone book if I tried to include all the groups.

Guest Blogger Heather Poole Shatters Five Flight Attendant Myths

Guest post by Heather Poole, author of Cruising Attitude: Tales of Crashpads, Crew Drama, and Crazy Passengers at 35,000 Feet

In her more than 15 years as an airline flight attendant, Heather Poole has seen it all. Here, she dispels the top five misconceptions about her profession:

1. A college degree is not required to become a flight attendant. But there are very few flight attendants who do not possess one. Being a flight attendant is considered a profession, not just a job. When Delta announced 1,000 openings in 2010, the airline received 100,000 applications. Only the most qualified are hired: being able to speak a second language helps, and so does having customer service experience.

2. Flight attendants are paid well. No one becomes a flight attendant for the money. The average salary for a first year flight attendant ranges between $14,000 and $18,000. Each year we get a standard raise across the board. Major carriers tap out around 13 years. This is one of many reasons why seniority at an airline is so important.

  3. Flight attendants barely work. Eighty five hours a month might sound pretty great, but those hours are flight hours only. Time during boarding spent cramming bags into bins and helping displaced families get seats together never shows up in our paychecks. The clock doesn’t start ticking until the plane backs away from the gate.

  4. Flight attendants love to date pilots. One flight attendant wrote down a few tips on the back of a beverage napkin for me: 1. Don’t do it. 2. Don’t do it. 3. Don’t do it. 4. If you do mess up and do it, don’t do it again. It’s only fair to mention I’m pretty sure there are plenty of pilots who feel the same way.

 5. Flight attendants party on layovers. Most domestic layovers average 10 hours. Add a delay into the mix and it’s nine hours. By the time we check-in to the hotel, it’s now an eight and a half hour layover. Keep in mind I need an hour and a half to get dressed and get back to the airport in the morning, which totals to seven hours of sleep if I can fall asleep the second I walk into my room. Sometimes there’s not enough time to eat, sleep and shower.

Guest Blogger: Elizabeth Percer, author of "An Uncommon Education"

Elizabeth Percer is a three-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and has twice been honored by the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation. She received a BA in English from Wellesley and a PhD in arts education from Stanford University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship for the National Writing Project at UC Berkeley. An Uncommon Education is her first novel.

When I first came to Wellesley College, I was in much the same position as my main character, Naomi, is in the book: naive, inexperienced, idealistic, and lost. Like Naomi, I came dangerously close to losing my childhood self on campus, or at least not caring if I did. I took astronomy and tried to join the right clubs, competed academically and talked about how stressed and overworked I was in that tone only the most over-privileged learn to adopt.  But I also lost thirty pounds and stopped wanting to visit my parents or write or--gasp--even read for pleasure. Fortunately, at the very last minute I was saved by the play. Actually, by playing.

The first time I acted in a play I was the third of the Three Billy Goats Gruff; the first time I took on a Shakespearean role, I played a simpering and long-winded man. I never grew, really, as an actor. But acting helped me to grow, perhaps simply by placing me within a series of great cocoons playwrights help create for their characters so that I might protect myself and emerge later, fully formed.

If I have learned anything as a lifelong student and sometimes teacher, it is that when we lose connection to our messier, less defined selves we also lose hope for true brilliance. I think about my kids--the way they play all the time and mess up language and talk to themselves unselfconsciously and cry and laugh openly in public--and I feel so grateful that I walked into a house of cross-dressing women devoted to the plays of a five-hundred-year-old playwright when I was nineteen. I might have otherwise been fine, but I also know that I would have grown disconnected to that more nebulous self, the one wherein all the truly important, undefined stuff of life has the opportunity to blossom.

--Elizabeth Percer

How Beloved Wise Guy John Corey Became a Series Regular

Guest post by New York Times best-selling suspense author Nelson DeMille. 

Back in 1997, I wrote a book titled Plum Island that featured a character named John Corey. Corey was NYPD homicide, though when we first meet him, he’s sitting on the back porch of a borrowed house that overlooks the water on the east end of Long Island, convalescing from wounds he’d received in the line of duty.

Corey is thinking about life, and one of his thoughts is, “It occurred to me that the problem with doing nothing is not knowing when you’re finished.” And thus was born the wisecracking but wise about-to-be-ex-cop.

I had never done a series character, and Corey was supposed to retire from the NYPD and retire from my life after I finished the book. But once it was published, I started getting hundreds of letters from readers asking if I was going to do another John Corey book.

Well, I wasn’t, but John Corey looked like he could pay the rent for me. The problem was, I’d retired Corey on a medical disability, which is almost as stupid as authors who kill off their main character.

The solution was to get Corey a job as a contract agent with the Federal Joint Terrorist Task Force (which I renamed the “Anti-Terrorist Task Force” in my books) and put him to work in the city he knew and loved, but this time chasing terrorists.

Thus began the Corey series: The Lion’s Game, Night Fall, Wild Fire, and The Lion. Corey will be back in October in The Panther, still paying my rent.

I learn from my fan letters. Many of them asked if I’d go back in time and show John Corey when he was a city detective. I’m not a fan of prequels, but finally the idea started to sound good.

But before I jumped into that idea with a full novel, I decided to write a short story and see how it played with readers—and with me. The result is The Book Case, a good-length short story showing an earlier John Corey before he got plugged by the bad guys and wound up on that back porch looking at the sea.

It was a challenge to do an earlier version of my successful Corey character, but also fun. And we get to see that the wiseass we know and love in the novels was always a wiseass. But we always suspected that.