There are two items worth a closer look in today’s Amazon Digital Deals: the Free App of the Day, and the Kindle Deal of the Day.
The Free App of the Day is Grill It!, a mobile grilling cookbook. This is the app to get when you’re going to be cooking al fresco at the beach, while camping, or for a tailgating party.
Browse the recipes by category to find something to your liking, or search by ingredients. Then, after you’ve bought everything you need for cooking and have arrived at your destination, fire up the grill and your Kindle Fire and follow the easy, heavily-illustrated directions on-screen to whip up your culinary masterpiece!
Note that while this app only has an average review rating of 3.5 stars, all of the 8 1-star reviews are either joke reviews (this has become a disturbing trend, people thinking it’s funny to post 1-star reviews with what’s supposed to be a humorous explanation for the poor rating) or reviews from people who complain about the app’s performance on a phone, or about the app’s phone permissions (which are not applicable to the Kindle Fire). If you omit those reviews, the app’s actual rating is 4.2/5 stars.
So if you love to grill, get Grill It! today, while it’s free!
For book lovers, Amazon’s offering a terrific collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s short fiction: Welcome to the Monkey House for $1.99 today only. This collection has an average review rating of 4.5/5 stars. From Amazon:
This short-story collection Welcome to the Monkey House (1968) incorporates almost completely Vonnegut’s 1961 “Canary in a Cathouse,” which appeared within a few months of Slaughterhouse-Five and capitalized upon that breakthrough novel and the enormous attention it suddenly brought.
Drawn from both specialized science fiction magazines and the big-circulation general magazines (Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, etc.) which Vonnegut had been one of the few science writers to sell, the collection includes some of his most accomplished work. The title story may be his most famous–a diabolical government asserts control through compulsory technology removing orgasm from sex–but Vonnegut’s bitterness and wit, not in his earlier work as poisonous or unshielded as it later became, is well demonstrated.
Two early stories from Galaxy science fiction magazine and one from Fantasy & Science Fiction (the famous “Harrison Bergeron”) show Vonnegut’s careful command of a genre about which he was always ambivalent, stories like “More Stately Mansions” or “The Foster Portfolio” the confines and formula of a popular fiction of which he was always suspicious. Vonnegut’s affection for humanity and bewilderment as its corruption are manifest in these early works.
Several of these stories (those which appeared in Collier’s) were commissioned by Vonnegut’s Cornell classmate and great supporter Knox Burger, also born in 1922.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House – $1.99 in Kindle edition, today only.