Ever since I got my kindle I have intrigued by these books that you can download for 99 cents. I mean how could that be bad? You are not making a big investment in time or money as they are generally short stories that you can just breeze through with out stopping to come up for air.
The great Lawrence Block talks about his stories that he is putting on Amazon for that great low price. It is a way to encourage short stories and novellas and such. I already have most of these stories in various collections I have bought through the years but will buy them again for a dollar. Just to have them on the kindle to pull up at my leisure.
Anyhoo, I got this crazy book called Thor Meets Captain America!
I found it by just typing in Captain America in the search function of the kindle and it popped right up. What it is about is an alternative universe where the Norse Gods of Asgard decide to ally themselves with the Germans during World War 2 and stop them from losing. Then Loki of all people rescues the Jews in the concentration camps and magically transports them to Israel.
And Loki becomes an ally of the United States and the Free World as they battle the Nazi's up till the 1960's! A villain becomes a hero! Dogs and Cats lie down together! Who would have thunk it.
Its a small idea and perfect for a novella. I haven't finished it yet but it is a pretty quick read. For 99 cents you can't beat it.
Plus the whole idea will give some people a heart attack. Just sayn'
24 comments:
The death of the novella and short story occurred before ebooks took hold. Those ebooks might bring them back. I'm with you, these might be great opportunities for authors right now.
I've always loved short stories. Wham-bam thank you ma'am, in tidy little package.
Hey, I know! Let's start a short story club! lol
But, seriously, I get to choose first:
A Simple Heart by Guy Maupassant
To be discussed, beginning next Friday.
Oops, did I spell that wrong?
Shoot, that's Gustave Flaubert.
Dear Trooper,
Today, I was just watching our next-door neighbor, Chuck, finish building a large fenced-in enclosure for his wife's cats. He enjoys cats, too. They both want to have outdoor cats. No weird, sickly, isolated indoor cats for them. They like animals who could roam and enjoy themselves in the nice backyard they have that opens into some pretty woods by the river.
Nothing like the free life.
Unfortunately, they lost their fourth cat to a coyote the other week, and enough was enough. A lot of people around here have had problems with coyotes lately. It looks like the only wild animals left are coyotes. We used to have raccoons, possums, and even fisher cats. Now it's all coyotes. Odd how that happened.
If you want to enjoy yourself in your backyard, you better watch out. You never know when the damn things will just appear out of nowhere and annoy the hell out of you, not to mention kill off your pets.
So, Chuck thought about it, and came up with a very nice enclosed area that has everything to keep cats and people happy. Took some effort, but it looks like it will be worth it.
Just thought I'd pass along a home improvement tip.
Your pal,
Tim
P.S.—Chuck was out there today reading his Kindle, too. I meant to ask him if he's read any of those $0.99 stories, but all we could talk about were coyotes.
How large is the cat enclosure, Tim?
Big enough for everyone but the coyotes.
That's nice. My daughter's cat is completely indoors. I've always wanted (very wishful thinking) to build an enclosure out of her bedroom window that would allow the cat some outdoors. As it stands, if I leave the front screen door slightly ajar, she can catch skinks.
Anyone here ever read Underworld by Delilo? I read the first chapter through Amazon and it blew me away.
Troop you especially should read the first chapter and let me know what you think.
Skinks are the most diverse group of lizards
Who knew?
Welcome back, MamaM. I hope your conference went well.
"Hoss?" "bipolar?" "mormonic?"
Ah-OOOOOooooh-ah! yip yip...
If you want "challenging" and "confusing," I highly recommend my current Kindle re-read (for the upteenth time, but 1st on a gadget) of Tristram Shandy
Now, just where was the siege where Uncle Toby was struck in the groin by a piece of hornwork struck off by a cannonball?
Thank you Deborah...Your welcome is appreciated, along with the smile that came with learning about skinks for the first time! It's good to go and good to come back home again too. Saw several monarch butterflies blow past the window on the way home (OH to MI), a sign the migration is underway. Turns out there was an overnight roost in the area.
Not ready for Delilo, but ordered Miroslav Volf's The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World today.
The Coyote is a trickster. In Native American culture there are many tales of the Coyote.
You must beware.
I take you point Tim and have started my home improvement project. I don't like a lot of fanfare. I just dive right in and fix it. Sometimes you try an addition to your home because you think it might enhance the property. But when you see that it really is an eyesore you just rip it out. No need for fanfare and marching bands. You just fix it.
Consider it done.
Hey, that sounds like fun. I have a bunch of short stories and even some novellas.
'course, I'd have to completely rewrite them. Get an editor. Then endure the humiliation of no one being willing to pay even 99 cents. Heh.
Hey where is Sissy Spacek and the fussy guy from the Old Couple when you need them?
I only mention Tristram Shandy as an example of another great thing about the Kindle: You can get free or very cheap classics by the bookshelf. Google Books and Project Gutenberg have lots of mobi- (Kindle) format books. You can get free, open source software to convert to the Kindle from plain text or other e-book formats, and even do some light editing if you feel particularly ambitious. A Kindle holds so much, there's no excuse not to have groaning library shelves of all the classics you meant to read as a kid, and maybe can now, if you make the time.
Which relates to my own reading habits: The Kindle has been a great thing, but I'm afraid I don't share Trooper's taste in books. My wife and choirboy son, OTOH, are great mystery and detective-fiction readers. They're in the kitchen half the nights my wife is cooking dinner (she's old-fashioned that way), talking up a storm about Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler and all the rest. They're great readers of Philip Marlowe, for example.
My problem with the genre is similar to ndspinelli's: My whole family were cops, and the reality of that life is just a little too close to my miserable childhood for me to ever find much entertaining about it. My Dad was a sergeant on the California Highway Patrol, my uncle an LAPD captain, another uncle a game warden; an uncle on my Mother's side had a checkered career as a special agent in the Panama Canal Zone (I think working for Treasury), and later a detective for several law enforcement agencies. Two aunts were P.O.'s. I have cousins who are or were a game warden, and a special investigator for the A.G.'s office, and later, with her husband, a P.I.
I fled the memory of what being a cop had done to my father to move to Boston to become artsy-fartsy in my own slightly industrial way. So, I'm afraid, having seen the effects of a lot of actual law on those who do the enforcing, I have a hard time finding anything thrilling about most thrillers. A lot of my family members had perfectly happy lives and careers in law enforcement. But it slowly killed my father.
To each his own, however. I'm married to someone who sounds a lot like Trooper, as far as literary entertainment goes. But so far, I haven't been able to get her to even look at a Kindle.
I have not read all of Tristram Shandy.
The movie was...interesting. And of course barely based on the book.
Coyote is so sneaky.
In the dim light coyote sneaks up, never seen, hardly heard. Then he's gone, just like that, and all that's left is a vague reminder, a little smell, a little scat.
The problem with Tristram Shandy on the Kindle is that Tristram Shandy is dependent on its odd typography—lots and lots of dashes, not to mention semicolons and colons used in arcane ways—so that it cannot be just tossed off, editing-wise. It needs to be appropriately reset, with em-dashes—and enough of them—so the texture and pacing of Sterne's hilarious prose retains its comic look. A lot of it is an amazing amalgam of visual and multi-layered textual humor.
Typography is the weak point of the Kindle. It has two very bad-looking typefaces, and It's common for even full-price Kindle books by major publishers to be full of typos and things like two en-dashes instead of one em-dash. If you're into the elegance of the page, the Kindle is only barely tolerable.
It was surprising to discover, but price has almost nothing to do with good editing and/or the look of the text. The reader can select so much about how the "page" looks, that it's easy to understand how having to accommodate everything anyone might choose would result in some pretty dreary typography. So, you can wind up with some really elegant free books from Project Gutenberg, for example, and some amazingly sloppy full-price books from Amazon.
That is why, in some cases, I prefer to read PDF's of original editions on the Kindle. It's a reasonably good PDF reader, and if you have a book in that format that you especially like the looks of, reading it on the Kindle is often the best way to go.
The kindle seems the way to go for me.
I was a confirmed luddite like you Tim. I love the feel of a book. The way you could fold down the corner of the page to mark you spot. The look of them on my bookshelf.
But the ease of purchaseing them and getting them to you kindle is really great. And theee dollar books are wonderful.
You can get ten great novellas for ten bucks. What's better than that?
Uh, buying no novellas and keeping the ten bucks. Don't they have libraries in NY? I have seen pictures of one in Manhattan - great lion sculptures, by the way. Coyotes would have been less impressive.
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