Here are some of the best-reviewed new Kindle Singles on offer. Kindle singles include longform memoir and journalism pieces, as well as novellas and essay collections. They’re great for when you want something to read, but don’t have the time to commit to a full-length book.
Drinking My Way Through 14 Dating Sites (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $2.99)
Sick of feeling heartbroken over her most recent breakup and underwhelmed by the rest of her life, Tiffany Peón decided to embark on a social experiment.
Over the course of one year, she used fourteen different online dating sites including Craigslist, speed dating and The Atlasphere, a site for fans of Ayn Rand.
Through drunken interactions with strangers, she learned the ins and outs of the online dating world and eventually found her way back to the relationship that started it all.
99 Stories of God (5/5 stars – only one review so far, currently priced at 99 cents)
ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF “STATE OF GRACE,” “ESCAPES,” “TAKING CARE,” AND “BREAKING AND ENTERING”
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Joy Williams has a one-of-a-kind gift for capturing both the absurdity and the darkness of everyday life. In “99 Stories of God,” she takes on one of mankind’s most confounding preoccupations: the Supreme Being.
This series of short, fictional vignettes explores our day-to-day interactions with an ever-elusive and arbitrary God. It’s the Book of Common Prayer as seen through a looking glass—a powerfully vivid collection of seemingly random life moments that is by turns comic and yearning and Kafkaesque. Kafka himself makes an appearance (talking to a fish), as do Tolstoy, the Aztecs, Abraham and Sarah, and O. J. Simpson. Most of Williams’s characters, however, are like the rest of us: anonymous strivers and bumblers who brush up against God in the least expected places or go searching for Him when He’s standing right there. The Lord shows up at a hot-dog-eating contest, a demolition derby, a formal gala, and a drugstore, where he’s in line to get a shingles vaccination:
“Have you ever had chicken pox?” asked the pharmacist.
“Of course,” the Lord said.
“How did you hear about us?”
Herself the daughter of a minister, Joy Williams instinctively understands one sure truth about God: He always gets the last laugh.
Trial By Fury: Internet Savagery and the Amanda Knox Case (4/5 stars, currently priced at 99 cents)
The Amanda Knox murder case generated one of the most savage outpourings of commentary the Internet has ever seen. There are countless statements calling for the murdering, raping, torturing, throat-cutting, frying, hanging, electrocution, burning, and rotting in hell of Amanda, along with her sisters, family, friends, and supporters. Why?
Trial By Fury explores this dark netherworld, identifying the people involved, and investigating their motives. It documents the real-world damage caused by these anonymous bloggers, including how they managed to get a much decorated ex-FBI agent fired from his job. It also recounts the story of the Wikipedia entry about the case, which triggered a spectacular brawl among top wiki-editors, leading to outings, rants, bannings-for-life, and death threats, requiring the intervention of Jimmy Wales himself.
The author, Douglas Preston, is one of the foremost authorities on the Amanda Knox case. He lived in Italy for many years and is an expert on the Italian criminal justice system. He has spoken about the case on the Today show, Anderson Cooper, 48 Hours, Dateline NBC, and Fox. He is the coauthor with Mario Spezi of The Monster of Florence, a nonfiction account of Italy’s most notorious serial killer, currently being made into a movie starring George Clooney.
PhiLOLZophy: Critical Thinking in Digestible Doses (5/5 stars, currently priced at $2.99)
A popular question in philosophy is “How do I know I exist?” That seems really boring though.
How about, “How can I use logic to get over my ex?” If you really love wisdom, you love it in all situations—you don’t need to be spoonfed unsolved problems in philosophy, because you’re already analyzing the US Weekly you’re reading or your kinda significant other.
Sarah Heuer and Chrissy Stockton are writers living in Minneapolis who are determined to do something more interesting with their philosophy degrees than talk about dead white guys.
PhiLOLZophy: Critical Thinking in Digestible Doses helps its readers think critically about vodka, religion and sex—proving that brains do have more fun.
A Textbook Case (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at 99 cents)
From Jeffery Deaver–the New York Times bestselling author of the upcoming Lincoln Rhyme novel THE KILL ROOM (on sale June 4, 2013)–comes an original short story featuring Rhyme.
When a young woman is found brutally murdered in a parking garage, with a veritable mountain of potential evidence to sift through, it may be the most challenging case former NYPD detective Lincoln Rhyme has ever taken on.
Ghost in the Cell (5/5 stars, currently priced at 99 cents)
With a violent, alcoholic mother and a father who committed suicide when she was just a baby, Yokia Mason’s life has never been easy. And after a childhood in which she and her siblings were subjected to vicious beatings and abuse, some of her family also turned to violence and crime.
How do we make sense of a life like Yokia’s? Scientists have spent decades trying, and their focus has been the complex sociology of urban life. But now a small band of researchers is claiming that biology plays a vitally important role. It’s a controversial idea, but the aim is not to resurrect the horrors of eugenics. Instead, the researchers are arguing that childhood traumas can leave an imprint on a victim’s cells, affecting not only their lives and abilities on a genetic level, but potentially those of their children too.
Author Scott Johnson has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq and central Africa. In the fifth story from experimental publisher MATTER, he weaves the extraordinary story of Yokia’s life into an examination of new results from the science of epigenetics — a field that may change the way we think about child abuse, mental illness and violence forever.
Click here to browse the full catalog of Kindle Singles.