Fundraisers -- Free and Reduced ebook lunches

Fundraisers (include perks)

Bring Haralambi Markov to World Fantasy

CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 5: more stories of beauty and strangeness

Spider Robinson's GOD IS AN IRON: Taking the Stage Play to WorldCon

Free and Reduced ebook lunches

Cobra
Timothy Zahn
Free

Qualify
(The Atlantis Grail Book 1)
Vera Nazarian
$0.99

Nightingale Songs
Simon Strantzas
$0.99

Glimpses
The Best Short Stories of Rick Hautala
Rick Hautala
$0.99

Evil Eye
Four Novellas of Love Gone Wrong
Joyce Carol Oates
$1.99

The Clockwork Rocket
(Orthogonal Book 1)
Greg Egan
$1.99

A Knot in the Grain: and Other Stories 
by Robin McKinley
$1.99

Stories of the Raksura
The Falling World & The Tale of Indigo and Cloud: 1
Martha Wells
$1.99

The Mammoth Book of Sorceror's Tales
(Note: this has two other titles for the same book--MB of Black Magic and MB of Dark Magic--each priced differently)
Mike Ashley, editor
$2.99

Wonderful Town
New York Stories from The New Yorker
David Remnick
$2.99

Review: Mystery, Inc. by Joyce Carol Oates

Mystery, Inc.  

Joyce Carol Oates
Open Road Integrated Media

Bibliomysteries are an ongoing mystery series from Open Road and  Mysterious Press (which offers a numbered edition of this book) about books and their places of habitation.

Mystery, Inc. is a fictitious bookstore that the narrator, who bills himself as "Charles Brockden*," is crazy about, jealous that the owner, Aaron Neuhaus, is able to weather bad times and good yet have a section dedicated to art, even. How does it weather tough financial doldrums?

As Brockden has done before, he concocts a murder, a poisoning, to buy the bookstore. But this bookstore has its own mysteries in store.

Mystery, Inc. is a novella, lovingly detailing a clear passion for classic mysteries and bookstores. The narrator is unsympathetic in the tradition of Iago. But Oates has a trick or two to play. First, the narrator sounds like Oates commenting on the writing of the story:

"I am very excited! For at last, after several false starts, I have chosen the setting for my bibliomystery."

It takes the readers a moment to reorient our perspective from reading about the author's production to the narrator's. Perhaps the idea here is that murder, in the eyes of the narrator, is its own creative act. He, too, is a kind of author.

This is less a literary classic to pore over, than a reader's pleasure, an entertainment. But a few games are afoot, including pop culture. Mystery, Inc. is the name of the Scooby Doo Mystery van and bookstore.

* Charles Brockden Brown was an early American novelist.

Free, new, and reduced ebook lunches

The Shamus Sampler 
by Sean Dexter, Reed Farrel Coleman, Keith Dixon, J.L. Abramo, Bill Crider, 
Jochem Vandersteen (Editor)
Free

Sunglasses After Dark 
(Sonja Blue Series) 
Nancy A. Colllins 
$0.99 

Voice of the Whirlwind 
by Walter Jon Williams 
$0.99 

The Amazon Analytics Bible: 
How To Use Analytics To Sell More Books On Amazon And Make Better Marketing Decisions
by Tom Corson-Knowles 
$0.99

Godforsaken Idaho 
by Shawn Vestal 
$1.99 

Single & Single​
by John le Carre 
$1.99 

The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published: 
How to Write It, Sell It, and Market It . . . Successfully 
by Arielle Eckstut, David Henry Sterry 
$2.51 

Better Than Fiction: 

True travel tales from great fiction writers 

by Alexander McCall Smith, Kurt Andersen, Stefan Merrill Block, Bryce Courtenay, M J Hyland, Peter Matthiessen,Frances Mayes, Joyce Carol Oates, Tea Obreht, DBC Pierre, 

Don George (Editor)

$3.64

 The Doors Of His Face, The Lamps Of His Mouth 

by Roger Zelazny 

$7.97 

Isle of the Dead, Eye of the Cat 

by Roger Zelazny 

$8.97 

Reduced ebook lunches

 Liquid Fear 
by Scott Nicholson 
$0.99

Missing Mom 
by Joyce Carol Oates 
$1.99 

The Apex Book of World SF2 
Lavie Tidhar 
$1.99
Today only

The Sands of Mars 
by Arthur C. Clarke 
$1.99 

Stories from the Twilight Zone 
by Rod Serling 
$1.99 

In Love & Trouble: Stories 
by Alice Walker 
$2.99

Modern Masters of Science Fiction -- $2.99 

1. Gregory Benford by George Slusser 
2. John Brunner by Jad Smith
3. Greg Egan by Karen Burnham 
4. William Gibson by Gary Westfahl 

Reduced ebook lunches

Today only:
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis 
by Lydia Davis 
$2.99

The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories 
by Ethan Rutherford 
$1.99 

***

Up Jumps the Devil 
by Michael Poore 
$1.99

Who Goes There? 
by John W. Campbell 
$1.99

Marya: A Life 
by Joyce Carol Oates 
$1.99

The Cove 
by Ron Rash 
$1.99

The Child in Time 
by Ian McEwan 
$2.99

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love 
by Oscar Hijuelos 
$1.99 

Fuzz 
by Ed McBain 
$1.99 

Kurt Vonnegut novels and collections 
$1.99

 Day of the Minotaur 
by Thomas Burnett Swann 
$2.51 

Free and reduced ebook lunches

The Monster Opera 
by Nancy Stohlman
Free

Dead Animals 
by CS DeWildt
Free

The Louisville Problem 
by CS DeWildt
Free

American Hunger 
by Richard Wright 
$0.99

Native Son 
by Richard Wright 
$1.99

The Stories of Paul Bowles 
by Paul Bowles 
Robert Stone (Introduction) 
$1.99

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 
by Annie Dillard 
$1.99

Harrowgate 
by Kate Maruyama 
$1.99

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 
by Betty Smith 
$1.99

A Widow's Story: A Memoir 
by Joyce Carol Oates 
$1.99

New Under the Sun 
by Nancy Kress, Therese Pieczynski 
$3.99

Reduced Joyce Carol Oates ebook lunches

Zombie 
$1.99

A Bloodsmoor Romance 
$1.99

The Tattooed Girl 
$1.99

Sourland: Stories 
$1.99

Faithless 
$1.99

A Fair Maiden 
$2.51

The Rescuer 
$2.99

Patricide 
$2.99

Free and reduced ebook lunches (includes award finalists and winners)

The Coyote Kings, 
Book One: Space-Age Bachelor Pad 
by Minister Faust
Free

Devil's Manhunt (Stories from the Golden Age) 
by L. Ron Hubbard
Free

Fear 
by L. Ron Hubbard
Free

A Book of Horrors 
edited by Stephen Jones 
$2.26

(a bunch of Stephen Jones' Best New Horror)

A Fair Maiden 
by Joyce Carol Oates 
 $2.51

Frontera 
by Lewis Shiner 
$2.99
(up for Nebula, Locus, and Philip K. Dick awards)

Deserted Cities of the Heart 
by Lewis Shiner 
$2.99
(up for Nebula, Locus, and Crawford awards)

(other Shiner titles--cheap)

All for Naught 
by John E. Stith 
$2.99
(two stories up for Locus, Anlab, and HOMer awards--the lattermost award the novella won)

Manhattan Transfer 
by John E. Stith 
$2.99
(up for Seiun and HOMer awards--the lattermost award the novella won)

Redshift Rendezvous 
by John E. Stith 
$3.49

(up for the Nebula, Locus, and HOMer awards--the lattermost award, the novel won)

The New Space Opera 2 
edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan
$3.79

Grandmaster Brian W. Aldiss is the rockstar of SF.  He has a new novel coming out, too.  TIt's a shame more of his back catalog isn't available... although Earthworks is--a novel whose opening images have stuck with long past any others.  The Helliconia Trilogy won the Campbell award and British SF award (twice).  Plus they were nominated for several Nebulas, Locus and other awards.

• Helliconia Spring $3.82
• Helliconia Summer $3.82
• Helliconia Winter $3.82

Seeds of Change 

edited by John Joseph Adams 

$3.99

The Perfect Host: 
Volume V: 
The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon
 $4.74

Close Reading of "Schrödinger's Cat" by Ursula K. Le Guin

Originally appeared in Terry Carr's Universe.  Reprinted in Dozois' Magicats, in Joyce Carol Oates' American Gothic Tales, and in  Leebron, Geyh, Levy's Postmodern American Fiction.

The narrator and "Rover" (if that's his name, which it is probably is not, although it is likely a part of the grander uncertainty) argue whether they should conduct Schrödinger's classic thought experiment, supposedly illustrating the absurdity of quantum theory:

If a cat is trapped in a box with (Le Guin uses a random photon release to trigger a silent gun) a radioactive substance that randomly emits radiation which may cause poison (cyanide, I'd heard) to kill a cat.  If we don't open the box determining the outcome, then cat is indeterminate both dead and alive, which is absurd--for a cat.  This, however, is now seen as the actual way we understand electron behavior.

Le Guin offers that the experiment itself is absurd, suggesting we don't know what the actual system is and who/what all is apart of it, and who are the observers impacting the outcome. A good observation about science and how, to a degree, scientists determine some of the outcome they're looking for through their observation.  More should be aware of this aspect of science.