Kindle Daily Post

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

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.

Guest Blogger: Robert B. Reich About Authoring "Beyond Outrage"

Guest post by Robert B. Reich, former Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton and current professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

I've written Beyond Outrage: What has gone wrong with our economy and our democracy, and how to fix them because we have to get beyond anger and cynicism in order to take back our economy and reclaim our democracy.

Wealth is more concentrated at the very top than it's been in 80 years, and large corporations and Wall Street are more powerful. The rich have reduced their tax rates lower than they've been since the 1920s. There's no money left for our public schools, public highways, public transit systems, public pipelines, public libraries, and public universities.

The regressive right is replacing the idea of the public good with a social Darwinism that gives the rich even more tax breaks, lets big corporations and Wall Street run rampant, cuts public services to the poor, and makes life as risky as possible for everyone else: survival of the fittest.

We're allowing this to happen because Americans are so angry and frustrated--so vulnerable to loss of job and healthcare and home--that we're easy prey for demagogues offering simple answers and ready scapegoats.

They blame our problems on undocumented immigrants, labor unions, public employees, the poor, or anyone who's different - gays, Hispanics, blacks.

They refuse to engage in real debate. Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, for example, accuses me of being a communist because I call for public investment in schools and infrastructure, but he doesn't have the guts to debate me.

They merely repeat their big lies that the rich need more tax breaks, that economic growth trickles down from the top, that regulation is bad, that government is our enemy.

And they want us to become cynical about the possibility of changing anything. That way, they win hands down.

Don't believe them.

Three times over the last century we've taken back our economy and reclaimed our democracy--during the progressive era at the start of the 20th century, in the Depression decade of the 1930s, and in the civil rights and women's rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

It is time to do so again.

American professor, economist, and commentator Robert B. Reich served in the administrations of presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. His exclusive Kindle Single, Beyond Outrage, was released on April 17, 2012.

Guest Blogger: Barry Malzberg on Kurt Vonnegut's Kindle Single, "Basic Training"

Thirteen years before the publication of Cat's Cradle, a 27-year-old Kurt Vonnegut wrote the dark, devilish novella, Basic Training, under the pseudonym of Mark Harvey--that foreshadows the novelist's powerfully anti-authoritarian world view. Never before published, it appears for the first time as an exclusive Kindle Single.

Here, writer Barry Malzberg describes its genesis:

This novella is a find, a work of anti-mythology disguised as a family memoir. Vonnegut doubtless intended it for Colliers or The Saturday Evening Post, the slick magazines which represented the apogee of the market and Vonnegut’s own desire in the late 1940s and early 50s. The work failed to sell and lay in Vonnegut’s trunk for 60 years. Here it is now, fresh and gleaming, fierce in its observation and as deadpan a demolition of the American authoritarian myth as anything he later produced. Everything old is new again.

Vonnegut was about 30 when he wrote this novella. In a long filmed interview with Eric Solstein in 1999 for Solstein’s documentary Trout, Vonnegut said “I was making a hundred a week and GE was paying for our health insurance, our pensions. One day a check came [for a short story] from The Saturday Evening Post for $700. I said to my wife, ‘This is very interesting.’”

The story seems autobiographical—too deliberate to be fully invented. The details are too precise and the insanity of the “General” who stands at its center too scattered and yet deliberate. Mark Vonnegut, the author’s son, confirms this, noting that “The pseudonym under which Basic Training was written is probably a conflation of my name and Harvey Cox, my mother’s father. It was great fun to read Kurt’s early version of his take on the military and heroism. There’s fantastic language throughout and a very mature voice for someone not quite thirty. The women and the General were, if anything, more fully drawn and human than characters in later [novels].” Another letter, from Vonnegut’s daughter Nanny confirms the personal nature of this story. The adolescent Kurt spent a summer on a farm near Indianapolis where Vonnegut grew up, administered rather brutally by a family friend who called himself the “Captain”. There was even quite a difficult stallion on the farm. And further like the protagonist of Basic Training, Vonnegut enjoyed playing the piano as a young man.

The lunacy of the “General” (Vonnegut obviously felt a promotion was in order) lays over the events of this story as thoroughly and convincingly as the madness of Campbell or Rosewater in Vonnegut’s later novels. Hope, the object of the hapless protagonist’s adoration in Basic Training is an embryonic Montana Wildhack, Billy Pilgrim’s sidekick in Slaughterhouse-Five. All of Vonnegut’s central concerns—the madness of Kings, the improbability of existence, the contingent and transient nature of all known experience except the purest of love—are clearly demonstrated and enacted through these 20,000 words. Vonnegut’s work suggests that flight is the only humane manner of dealing with madness… but where does one flee? The General is everywhere, and the General seems to almost every outsider he encounters so utterly “reasonable”.

At the heart of this novella, as at the heart of all Vonnegut’s work, is a simple and terrible acceptance. Heigh-ho. So it goes. Onward. The General has a secret and that secret, revealed at last, can be traced through another fifty years of Vonnegut’s writing to capture us yet again today and tomorrow.

—Barry Malzberg

Photo: Kurt Vonnegut, his wife Jane and his daughter Nanny, courtesy of Nanny Vonnegut.

Guest Blogger: Margaret Atwood on her Kindle Single, "I'm Starved for You"

Margaret Atwood is the author of the internationally best-selling novel The Handmaid’s Tale as well as forty other books of fiction and nonfiction. Atwood was awarded the Booker Prize in 2000 for The Blind Assassin.

“I saw a public librarian today reshelving Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. She moved it from Science Fiction to Current Events.” This quip—of unknown origin—has been all over Twitter lately. Is it a joke? An urban legend? A scrap of reportage? Who can tell?

But right now, at the time of Rick Santorum’s musings on how to restrain women and Rush Limbaugh’s anti-birth-control rant and slutfest, The Handmaid’s Tale tweet is resonating. How does it feel to be so prescient, people ask? Do I have the second sight? A crystal ball? The ability to read the stars? How soon will The Handmaid’s Tale change from novel to recipe?

The future is like the afterlife: no one can actually go there and return. So I can’t predict the future; it just looks like that sometimes. I don’t stargaze: I read the newspapers. And the magazines. And the blogs. They don’t tell me the future, either, but from them I can gather bits and pieces that might be fitted together into something fictional, but plausible.

I’ve just published a long/short story, I’m Starved for You, via Byliner—in itself a sign of the times, because this is the first story I’ve published as an original in e-form. Is this a straw in the wind? Let’s hope so. The magazine publication of short fiction—which flourished from the thirties through the sixties—has been drying up for a long time. Now the Internet, by providing destinations where such pieces are welcome, is opening up the market for short stories again.

I’m Starved for You is set in a near future that may be even closer to us than the one envisioned in The Handmaid’s Tale. Its world is an expansion of present-day mega-prisons, rationalized to provide full employment by having prisoners and civilians take turns in the cells. To duplicate its setting, the town of Consilience and its central prison, Positron, all you’d need is some walls and a lot of surveillance: all the equipment needed is already with us.

There’s one feature of any future that a writer has to take into account: the role of our digital technologies. These determine who knows what about whom, and they also determine who wants to control what, and how. All around us, the cyber wars are being waged—between governments and rebels, between security systems and hackers—so in Consilience you can have a phone, but you can’t dial the outside world. We are probably the most spied-upon generation in history, and the future world of Consilience is no exception.

And now the thing you really want to know: what do they read in Consilience? Because, above all else, any self-respecting controlled society wants to control your mind.

Well, there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that, for obvious reasons, the citizens of Consilience don’t have access to the Internet.

The good news is that you do. Or you wouldn’t be reading this.

--Margaret Atwood

Guest Blogger: John Hooper, author of the Kindle Single, "Fatal Voyage"

Fatal Voyage describes the terrifying tick-tock of the January sinking of the Costa Concordia cruise ship, and its deadly aftermath--with fresh new details reported by John Hooper, the Rome correspondent for The Guardian, who covered the disaster from the Tuscan island of Giglio.

Sometimes life can take you in a long, broad arc back to somewhere you thought you had long ago consigned to memory.

On my very earliest visit to Italy, at the age of 18, I was asked by an opera singer to skipper his powerboat. The first trip was to be around the island of Giglio. I botched it hopelessly, and was sacked on our return to Porto Ercole.

Scroll forward many years -- years I have mostly spent as a newspaper foreign correspondent -- to the morning of January 14^th, 2012. I am in bed in Rome with a bout of flu when I am woken up to be told that there has been a shipwreck in the night. The flu has to be forgotten as I drive at breakneck, and doubtless illegal, speeds up the Via Aurelia to Porto Santo Stefano where the survivors are being brought ashore.

The next day, I manage to hitch a ride on a Coast Guard patrol boat to Giglio where the stricken liner, the Costa Concordia, has come to grief. Within an hour or so I am on the rocks by the ship watching from less than 100 meters away as the last of the survivors to be rescued alive is winched out on a stretcher.

Thus began my involvement with a story that brims with drama -- and still holds a number of mysteries.

In writing Fatal Voyage, I have had the benefit of access to material gathered by the prosecutors in their continuing investigation into the causes of the disaster. But, while I hope readers will find in the story new facts and original perspectives, my overriding aim has been to write a minute-by-minute narrative that brought to life the terrifying reality of what it was like to be trapped aboard a vast, capsizing ship.

To try to do that, I needed to interview someone who had been on the Costa Concordia throughout the various phases of the emergency: someone with good powers of description and, ideally, a knowledge of the sea. I found the perfect interviewee in Dean Ananias, a retired Californian schoolteacher who served in the US Navy during the Vietnam War.

For well over an hour, he talked me through his experiences and those of his wife and two daughters – heart-stoppingly frightening experiences that led them on four occasions to say their good-byes, believing their luck had run out and that they were about to die. By the time I finished speaking to Dean, my own pulse was racing and, when I put down my notebook, I let out a very long “Phew …”

I hope you’ll feel something of the same when you come to the end of Fatal Voyage.

--John Hooper

Guest Blogger: Marc Herman on the Kindle Single, "The Shores of Tripoli"

Marc Herman has reported from volcanoes in Java, vaccine trials in Mozambique, fire festivals in Spain, and Presidential debates in New Hampshire. His new Kindle Single, The Shores of Tripoli, tells the intimate story of a small town facing life or death choices amid Libya's 2011 revolution.

For most of this summer, the people of Nalut, Libya endured a vicious, seemingly ceaseless attack -- by soldiers of their own government. When I first arrived to the little mountain town this past June, the story that became The Shores of Tripoli leapt out at me. Who are these people? How are they going to survive this -- much less win? Did the 18,000 residents of Nalut, one of the first towns to rise up against the Qaddafi dictatorship last spring, have regrets? How are normal people responding to the sudden, historic moment they find themselves amid?
 
I ended up asking those questions of people in Nalut, who were open and kind with me, despite their desperate circumstances. They could have been residents of a small town anywhere. One was an accountant who had become, reluctantly, a militia foot soldier. Another was dental student who had been among the first to storm the office of the secret police. Finally, I met a middle-class family in Tripoli, that had faced a life or death moment as the regime crumbled, and told the story of that terrifying moment.
 
The Shores of Tripoli is at heart journalism – I was in Libya, after all, as reporter. But it turned out to be a story less about the Where, What and Why of a war, than about the Who of it. It's about the people caught up in events beyond their wildest fears. I ended up being drawn to that experience, and meeting people willing to share their versions of it with me.

Just a handful of weeks later, now I wonder if their stories will turn out to only matter to Libya. In the just the past month, the Arab Spring has threatened to become a long, hard winter. Syria looks very similar to Libya six months ago. Yemen boils. And no one seems to understand what Egypt’s future holds. The stories I heard in Libya feel more and more like a reference point for what's to come in other places, or already has, both for good and for not.
 
Ultimately, the story I came away with, and the reason I wrote The Shores of Tripoli through the testimony of a family, and through the thoughts of an isolated town on the edge of a beautiful desert mesa, was to try to understand how normal people successfully navigated extraordinary circumstances, and continue to do so today.
 
I still wonder what I would do in their place.

--Marc Herman

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.

Halloween Guest Post: Jennifer Weiner on "Recalculating"

Jennifer Weiner is the #1 New York Times best-selling author of seven books, including Best Friends Forever, Good in Bed, In Her Shoes, and Certain Girls. Her new Kindle Single is a terrifying, otherworldly tale of the restless dead.

***

One of the questions that motivates writers--one that haunts us, you could say--is the one I call "the great what-if." Consider technology. We live in a world where we can store ten thousand songs in a device the size of a pack of playing cards, pause live TV shows, download movies to our tablets, beam books into our Kindles, and buy anything from jeans to jewelry from the comfort of our couches. We can tweet and text and Facebook; we can Google potential romances (and Google-stalk the discards), and when we want to go somewhere new, we just plug the address right into the GPS, and we're off.

Few of us would want to ever go back to a world without those conveniences, but still… what if?

Even the sleekest and smartest new toys occasionally let us down. Screens crack, networks crash, banks accidentally email our Social Security number to thirty thousand strangers. Things fall apart, the center will not hold, the Fail Whale lurks in the shallows… and, if we allow for the possibility of human error, maybe it's not too radical to think about inhuman error, too.

Last Tuesday, I was driving back from a suburb I'd never visited. "Take me home," I told the GPS… and, maybe because it was so dark, and the road so empty, and Halloween just around the corner, I started thinking: What if, I wondered, the GPS took me to a cemetery instead?

Just like that, I had a story. An abused wife. A dead husband who was determined not to stay dead. A gift-wrapped box in the attic. And, inside, a GPS that would tell her to make some desperately wrong moves.

Here's where technology became my friend again. On Wednesday morning, I told my agent that the Story Fairy had left me something scary. If I wrote it, say, right now, was there any chance we could e-publish it on Halloween?

My agent called my publisher, and everyone on that end swung into action. While I was writing, they were designing a cover, securing an ISBN, putting together pre-sale links and, eventually, getting the piece edited and formatted. Today, on Halloween, you can buy the story I called "Recalculating," a bittersweet treat about what happens when the devices designed to help us decide that they have other things in mind.

I hope you like it. I hope it freaks you out a little bit, too. And, if you've got any long trips planned and you're relying on your GPS to see you there safe, I hope you'll pack a map.

The Essay Is the Attempt Itself, or Why I Love "The Codex"

I've had the privilege of reading and reviewing a lot of Kindle Singles this year. Ranging in topic from 17th-century Japanese poetry to the 21st-century Egyptian uprising, the highlights have been many and memorable. But none more so than two Kindle Singles from Oliver Broudy: The Saint, a compelling existential adventure that takes the author to the Himalayas for a face-to-face showdown with his own ennui; and, most recently, The Codex.

What is the codex? Quite simply, it's a book, a catalogue compiled and kept by a Czech cosmetic surgeon named Svoboda. Its pages contain a litany of variations on an ideal, inspired by the essay's other central character, an oversexed nonagenarian multi-media artist who has long inspired Svoboda.

And what is The Codex? On one level, it's Broudy's twin profile of both the artist and the surgeon. On another, it's a document of the author's journey to find and confront the book itself. Finally, though, it is another transcontinental adventure, this time fueled by Broudy's mix of attraction to and revulsion for the book's contents. [Warning: No spoiler forthcoming.]

Broudy excels at nesting traditional essay structures, in this case a profile within a profile within a quest within a memoir of sorts. At the level of mere craft, this notable skill leaves most of what makes the pages of annual, book-length essay revues rather wanting. But structural savvy alone does not make great writing; Broudy elevates the stakes of the form by forging meaning out of utterly surprising connections that yield searing insights into modern life.

One meaning of essay, of course, is "attempt," an effort to do or create something that hasn't been done before and, by implication, is not a guaranteed success. It's this understanding of the word that best illuminates why Oliver Broudy is developing into one of the essay's masterful modern practitioners. There is no shortage of clean, succinct, tightly packaged, eminently marketable essays in circulation today, and plenty of dependable publications in which to find them. Broudy's essays attempt more. Inevitably, they're not for everybody. But given what I've read so far, I'm much more interested in reading Oliver Broudy's next failure than most modern essayists' next smashing successes.

     --Jason Kirk