Kindle Singles are a great way to discover new authors, and at a price of just 99 cents each, you can hardly go wrong with any of these well-reviewed examples:
How To Get Into Harvard (4.5/5 stars)
A teenage girl has been murdered in the sand dunes just outside the house of Dr. Peter Hamilton. The victim is his daughter. Among those looking on as the police investigate is 17-year-old neighbor Amy Lund, a gifted, home-schooled student almost certain of admission to Harvard. Yet she has a secret – and is torn between keeping quiet about what she knows and divulging information that would destroy her own reputation. It does not help that she is in love, from afar, with a boy who was seeing the murdered Hamilton girl, or that she could implicate him in this seemingly random murder.
Paul Micou is the author of eight novels, among them The Music Programme, The Death of David Debrizzi, The Leper’s Bell and, most recently, Confessions of a Map dealer. He lives with his wife and two children in Provence.
“Mr. Micou writes with an unfailing comic sense… He has a smart, brisk style… The book often is hilarious, and never less than engaging.” –The Wall Street Journal
“Micou manages to hit many targets without losing the gentle freshness of the satire.” –The Sunday Times
“Graceful, skillful, brilliant…doesn’t begin to do justice to his gorgeous grasp of character and the crispness of his writing.” – The Times
Fox 8 (4/5 stars)
Fox 8 has always been known as the daydreamer in his pack, the one his fellow foxes regarded with a knowing snort and a roll of the eyes. That is, until Fox 8 develops a unique skill: He teaches himself to speak “Yuman” by hiding in the bushes outside a house and listening to children’s bedtime stories. The power of language fuels his abundant curiosity about people—even after “danjer” arrives in the form of a new shopping mall that cuts off his food supply, sending Fox 8 on a harrowing quest to help save his pack. Told with his distinctive blend of humor and pathos, Fox 8 showcases the extraordinary imaginative talents of George Saunders, whom the New York Times called “the writer for our time.”
Praise for George Saunders and Tenth of December
“The best book you’ll read this year . . . more moving and emotionally accessible than anything that has come before.”—The New York Times Magazine
“Saunders is a complete original, unlike anyone else.”—Dave Eggers
“Affecting [and] wincingly funny . . . It’s no exaggeration to say that the short story master George Saunders helped change the trajectory of American fiction.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Subversive, hilarious, and emotionally piercing.”—Jennifer Egan
“Not since Twain has America produced a satirist this funny.”—Zadie Smith
“George Saunders makes the all-but-impossible look effortless. We’re lucky to have him.”—Jonathan Franzen
“Tenth of December isn’t just [Saunders’s] most unexpected work yet; it’s also his best . . . as weird, scary, and devastating as America itself.”—NPR
“An astoundingly tuned voice—graceful, dark, authentic, and funny—telling just the kinds of stories we need to get us through these times.”—Thomas Pynchon
“The best short-story writer in English alive.” —Mary Karr
Pleased To Be Otherwise (4.5/5 stars)
Timi, a boy in Uzbekistan, navigates a strange world of camel breeding, half-understood Islamic doctrine, Mexican soap operas dubbed into Uzbek, and the legacy of widespread pollution from the Soviet era, all while dreaming of doing death-defying stunts on his rickety motorcycle.
Lonely and accident-prone, Timi befriends an American humanitarian worker in a struggling marriage, tries to avoid his father’s frequent rages, and plans out the astonishing motorcycle jump that will give meaning to his life. A brilliant, comic look at an almost unknown country and its fascinating contradictions.
PRAISE FOR GINA OCHSNER
“Ochsner’s flawed, wholly sympathetic characters miraculously stumble into small moments, shaped with a delicious sense of the absurd, which connect them to a world that’s magical, merciful, and infinite.” —Booklist
“…with luminous writing, affection for her characters and, especially, faith in the language’s humanizing power, [Ochsner] manages to find a portion of hopefulness.” —Ken Kalfus, The New York Times
Friends of Whitmore (4.5/5 stars)
Alex works in a gallery in the small Connecticut town where he moved after inheriting his parents’ house.
One day, at a local CPR class, he meets Tea, a young woman and aspiring artist who invents a mutual acquaintance named Whitmore as a means of breaking the ice and introducing herself. As their relationship deepens, Alex becomes preoccupied with imagining who Whitmore might be, considering Whitmore to be a paragon of masculine perfection. But when the Whitmore myth begins to unravel, so does Alex’s relationship with Tea.
A charming story about how we relate to each other and the devices we sometimes invent in order to make sense of the world around us.
This Kindle Single is part of Day One Fiction, a new short-story series by today’s best new voices in fiction. Day One stories are sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, and always compelling and insightful.