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Lots of stuff, ranging from The Perfect Storm to Fight Club to How Music Works.

Currently, $10 will get you the whole collection, and I have no doubt that they'll be adding more as the sale goes on.

I've been looking forward to reading this one for quite a while. And since I literally GROANED OUT LOUD when I finished the excerpt—I didn't want it to be over!—I shall have to pick it up ASAP. MAYBE EVEN TODAY.... Read the rest of this post

Emma Newman's Between Two Thorns and Any Other Name are $1.99 today.

They LOOK intriguing, with cover art that somewhat reminiscent of Cassandra Rose Clarke's Assassin's Curse books, and they deal with magic and faery in the Regency Era, which oooooooooo.

Have you read them? Should I snap them up?

SYNC's 2014 Summer Schedule has been announced, so get to downloading!

Seven of Jim Butcher's TOTALLY AWESOME Harry Dresden books are $1.99 today.

Even though we have them all in paper, I am sorely tempted to buy them. Sigh. The trials and tribulations of being a book addict.

Publishers Lunch has released two new editions of Buzz Books: one for the adult market, and one for the YA market.

From the YA description:

Excerpts you can read right now include new work from established giants of the field (Ellen Hopkins; Garth Nix; Scott Westerfeld), authors best-known for their adult books (Carl Hiaasen; Michael Perry; Ben Tripp; Meg Wolitzer), and genuine newsmakers—including the first of James Frey’s attention-getting Endgame trilogy, which will include interactive elements developed in association with Google’s Niantic Labs.

From the adult description:

Highly-anticipated debuts include multi-generational family epic We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas, featured on BEA’s own “buzz books” editors panel alongside another highly-touted debut set for publication in over 30 countries, Jessie Burton’s The Miniaturist. We have Nayomi Munaweera’s novel longlisted for the 2012 Man Asian Literary Prize, Island of a Thousand Mirrors, and Audrey Magee’s The Undertaking, already shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize in Fiction.

Well-established authors such as Tana French, Marlon James, John Scalzi and W. Bruce Cameron are represented with new work, as are excerpts from the last books in two popular series from Lev Grossman and Deborah Harkness.

At USA Today:

I was sent here because of a boy. His name was Reeve Maxfield, and I loved him and then he died, and almost a year passed and no one knew what to do with me. Finally it was decided that the best thing would be to send me here. But if you ask anyone on staff or faculty, they'll insist I was sent here because of "the lingering effects of trauma." Those are the words that my parents wrote on the application to get me into The Wooden Barn, which is described in the brochure as a boarding school for "emotionally fragile, highly intelligent" teenagers.

On the line where it says "Reason student is applying to The Wooden Barn," your parents can't write "Because of a boy."

But it's the truth.

Well, based on that, it's certainly a familiar story, but we'll see.

Cat Patrick and Suzanne Young's Just Like Fate is a mere $1.99 today.

I loved it:

This premise could easily have resulted in a book that reads like a literary exercise*, but Just Like Fate succeeds across the board. It feels like a real story about real people, and the aforementioned parallels are overt enough to be noticeable—in one storyline, Caroline connects with a boy via banter; in the other, she attempts the same sort of banter with a different boy and it falls flat—while still being subtle enough to avoid being gimmicky. Patrick and Young write seamlessly in the same voice; Caroline is believable, imperfect and sympathetic; and her friends and family are just as believable and well-drawn.

Rick Yancey's The 5th Wave is $2.99 today, so if you've been planning on reading it but still haven't gotten around to buying a copy, today is the day!

Click on through for excerpts of:

The A-Word, by Joy Preble

Hero Complex, by Margaux Froley (Enjoyed the first one, so I'm looking forward to this one!)

I Become Shadow, by Joe Shine

Ask Me, by Kimberly Pauley

The Kindle edition of Melina Marchetta's brilliant—YES, BRILLANT—Jellicoe Road is currently $1.99.

So, if you haven't read it (or if you want yet another copy), snag it while you can.

From my long-ago post about it:

Melina Marchetta's writing is top-notch, spot-on, perfect-a-mundo, beautiful, her characters are believable, so real that less than twenty pages in, I forgot I was reading a novel—both because I was so involved in the story that I felt like a bystander and because the characters were so immediately real to me. 

Yet again, some Strange Chemistry titles are on sale: Cassandra R. Clarke's The Assassin's Curse and The Pirate's Wish.

I could have sworn that I already bought The Assassin's Curse, but it doesn't appear to be in my library, so I guess not.

Oh, well: goodbye to $1.99 x 2, then, and HELLO MOAR BOOKS. 

Strange Chemistry has been all about the sales lately, eh?

Anyway, Eliza Crewe's Cracked is $1.99 today.

I wrote about it at Kirkus last fall:

I ADORED Eliza Crewe’s Cracked. It’s smart, it’s funny, it’s full of action and bare-handed decapitations. Meda’s voice is hilarious and snarky and brash and inhuman and original. She’s an art lover with a wonderfully morbid sense of humor, a monster who takes joy in brutal violence but who secretly hates herself for giving in to her mindless rage, and she’s a girl who’s all alone and just wants to know who she is. She's a quick thinker who considers every angle of a situation, and she doesn't yearn for humanity or, as Buffy’s Spike so wonderfully puts it, exhibit any of “that Anne Rice crap.” She's a mostly unrepentant killer who doesn't shy away from playing the damsel in distress card—even when she's the most dangerous thing in the room.

• Liz Burns and A Chair, A Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy have a new home. Head on over and say hello!
• Inscription: A Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for Teens. Their first story is up!

The Chance You Won't Return by Annie Cardi Chapter Sampler by Candlewick Press

Yes, another one!:

When the World was Flat (and we were in love), by Ingrid Jonach

And yes, I bought it, description unseen, even!

FYI: A whole bunch of Daniel Pinkwater ebooks are currently available for the low, low price of $2.99, and they're free to borrow if you're a Prime member.

THE SNARKOUT BOYS. YOUNG ADULT!

I swoon.

Yes, my beloved Blood Red Road is a mere $1.99 today.

Relatedly: It was mentioned briefly in a recent Atlantic article entitled, "Must Every YA Action Heroine Be Petite?" (While there were a lot of broad generalizations made, and the examples used didn't suggest that the author had a broad knowledge of YA, I was SO happy to see that she mentioned the FAT = EVIL unpleasantness in Divergent. Because that was so, so glaring.)

The comments section, as you might expect, gets ugly super-fast: lots of FEMALE ACTION HEROES MAKE NO SENSE BECAUSE GIRLS DON'T HAVE MUSCLES and OF COURSE THEY'RE THIN, THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO BE ATTRACTIVE and the ever-popular FEMINISTS ARE DUMB AND WOMEN'S ISSUES ARE NON-EXISTENT and BODY IMAGE ISSUES ARE ALL IN YOUR PRETTY LITTLE HEAD AND IF YOU "ALLOW" THE MEDIA TO AFFECT YOUR PERCEPTION OF WHAT "NORMAL" GIRLS LOOK LIKE, THEN YOU'RE STUPID AND WEAK and also, FORGET THE LADIES, WHERE ARE ALL THE MALE ACTION HEROES???

And my personal favorite, DISCUSSION = ENABLING, or IF YOU DON'T LIKE SOMETHING, THEN JUST IGNORE IT AND DON'T TALK ABOUT IT OR TAKE STEPS TO COMBAT IT, AND IT WILL MAGICALLY GO AWAY. You know, like racism. Or chlamydia.

I'm being hyperbolic here, but only slightly. 

It's only $1.99!

AND IT IS TOTALLY WORTH WAAAAAAAAAAAAY MORE THAN THAT!

• The 2014 Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist has been released, and HEAVENS TO BETSY, THERE ARE A COUPLE OF LADIES ON IT.
• At the Guardian: Sofia Coppola to direct live-action Little Mermaid adaptation. And yes, they're going with the original, depressing, tragic-ass ending.
• Book trailer: William Shakespeare's Star Wars: The Empire Striketh Back!
• Lots of YA in the third Humble Bundle eBook Bundle, including Holly Black, Cory Doctorow, Scott Westerfeld, and the Zombies vs. Unicorns anthology.
• Speaking of good YA, dirt cheap: the Kindle version of Terry Farish's The Good Braider is $1.99 today.
• Mashable: The 25 Best Tumblr Accounts for Book Nerds.
• Yet another March Madness Event: the Tournament of Sidekicks. LAUNCHPAD MCQUACK!
• I really loved Midwinterblood, but Mac Barnett's takedown of it is hilarious. (And his reasoning is both sound and convincing.)
• Want a Doctor Who Lego set?
• New fave Pinterest board: Pointlessly Gendered Products. Fairy Hearts... SAUSAGES. Also, Diva vegetables. I don't even.

Ten of Lawrence Block's hilarious Bernie Rhodenbarr books are 99¢ today.

SQUEEEEEEEEE!

[ETA: Oh, wait. The heading says they're 99¢, but the books are listed as $1.99. CONFUSING!]

Peruse it at your leisure over at the Guardian.

From Open Culture:

danah boyd (she doesn’t capitalize her name) is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, where she looks at how young people use social media as part of their everyday lives. She has a new book out called It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, and she’s made it available as a free PDF. On her website she writes, “I didn’t write this book to make money. I wrote this book to reach as wide of an audience as I possibly could.  This desire to get as many people as engaged as possible drove every decision I made throughout this process. One of the things that drew me to Yale [the publisher] was their willingness to let me put a freely downloadable CC-licensed copy of the book online on the day the book came out.”

Related: NPR interview with the author.

Lauren DeStefano's Perfect Ruin is $1.99 today, and as I haven't read it, I snagged it.

DID I MAKE THE RIGHT CHOICE?

Yes, as you may have guessed from the title of this post, Jen Calonita's Belles is $2.99 today.

From my review:

Anyway, Belles. There's really not a whole lot to say, as it's very what-you-see-is-what-you-get, with some super-sudsy entertaining soap-opera plot twists and a delightfully, bitchily evil adult antagonist. Fingers crossed that the CW picks it up, because with a good cast, it could be loads and loads of fun. AND OH MY GOD, THEY COULD CAST TAYLOR HANDLEY (BETTER KNOWN AS OLIVER TRASK) AS THE AFOREMENTIONED BITCHILY EVIL ADULT ANTAGONIST.

THAT WOULD BE AWESOME.

Ahem.