Category: Giveaways

*** Winner selected! Congratulations to Celeste in Mission, Kansas! ***

Love gritty, vulnerable, unapologetic stories about womanhood? If you haven’t read Elizabeth Ellen’s Fast Machine yet, you’re missing out. This visceral collection of short stories will take you to heady, dangerous places —

Erotic asphyxiation, schizophrenia, internet stalking, motherhood — The stories tackle a whole range of scary topics, all with an intense energy that makes you feel you’re right in the middle of it all. Elizabeth’s emotional prose recalls Lydia Davis and Doris Lessing — with a contemporary, digital age twist.

Roxane Gay says ” The best thing about Ellen’s writing is that it has big brass balls.” Vol. 1 Brooklyn says Fast Machine is “a book that leaves you reeling again and again.” The Stranger says “What Ellen is doing here is going deep inside herself and coming back with something small and glistening and vulnerable cradled in her hands.”

Get a copy of Fast Machine now, or sign up with your email below to be entered to win a free copy! Already signed up for my newsletter? Then you’re already entered!

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Come back mid-month to read a Five Firsts interview with Elizabeth Ellen!

*** Winner selected! Congratulations to Sam in Greencastle, Indiana! ***

Do you like scary stories? If you love being frightened by a fantastic literary read, you must pick up Stefan Kiesbye‘s novel Your House is on Fire, Your Children All Gone this Halloween month.

Innocent-looking children full of strange horrors. Quiet little family homes hiding dark, shameful secrets. Placid small town life interrupted by sudden, dire consequences. Stefan’s novel is like a dark, Grimms brothers-esque read — with an R rating. Hexes, Oedipal complexes, battles of the sexes — This novel has it all.

Here’s a sample chapter summary: A boy figures out his sister was impregnated by his dad. So the boy uses an old folk remedy to punish his father — until his father eats himself to death. But the mom and sister, far from being happy to be rid of the incestuous father, aren’t too pleased with the turn of events. Everyone but the boy had been perfectly content with things as they were….

Each chapter’s like this, focusing on a different child in the village and the bizarre shenanigans he or she goes through. Those stories are bookended by a reunion of sorts of the now grown up kids (the ones that are still alive, anyway), so we get to see how they ended up after all the terrible traumas.

Get a copy of Your House Is on Fire now, or sign up with your email below to be entered to win a free copy! Already signed up for my newsletter? Then you’re already entered!

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Come back mid-month to read a Five Firsts interview with Stefan Kiesbye!

*** Winner selected! Congratulations to Jane in Los Angeles! ***

Memoirs don’t get much more riveting than Jillian Lauren’s Some Girls: My Life in a Harem. That’s right — Jillian once worked as a call girl and stripper in New York before agreeing to fly out to Borneo — to join the harem of Prince Jefri Bolkiah, youngest brother of the Sultan of Brunei.

Some Girls details the surreal life Jillian lived there: strange late nights spent drinking and dancing for the prince’s exclusive pleasure, crazy expensive shopping sprees, petty jealousies, unexpected alliances, and much more.

Although the titillating tidbits about harem life tends to get most of the attention, Some Girls takes us from Jillian’s childhood as an adoptee struggling with a contentious relationship with her father to her marriage to Weezer bassist Scott Shriner and adoption of her own child. The memoir is a fascinating dive into life’s bigger questions: what attracts us and repels us, why we make the choices we do, how we change and shift with time. It’s a coming of age story that forces us to confront the ways we construct our own identities.

Get a copy of Some Girls now, or enter to win one by signing up for my newsletter to the right. Already signed up? Then you’re already entered!

Come back mid-month to read a Five Firsts interview with Jillian Lauren!

*** Winner selected! Congratulations to Rachel in San Francisco! ***

Imagine a grimmer, harsher California of the future, where urban centers have been bombed out or abandoned and survivalists forge new surreal lives in the wilderness. Edan Lepucki’s first novel California brings this scary world to life, following the do-or-die adventures of 20-something Frida and her husband Cal.

The young couple flees a chaotic and violent Los Angeles to settle in a shack in the middle of nowhere, where they eke out a tenuous living — until Frida finds herself pregnant. The two then decide to look for a community for support — and find one filled with secrets, strange paranoias, and unexpected dangers.

Angelenos will especially enjoy this book, as it provides a vision of L.A. that’s both provocative and painful: The fountain at The Grove gone sludgy, the lawns dried dead, the residents starving on the sidewalks.

Get a copy of California now, or enter to win one by signing up for my newsletter to the right. Already signed up? Then you’re already entered!

Come back mid-month to read a Five Firsts interview with Edan Lepucki!

*** Winner selected! Congratulations to Chris in Willits, California! ***

If the love stories of your own life seem more a disjunct collage of contradictory moments than a clear-cut romantic narrative, you’ll love Kevin Sampsell‘s first novel. This Is Between Us (Tin House, 2013) tells the story of a tumultuous, contemporary love affair, dissected in intimate fragments — from the infatuated, fantasy-filled beginnings to the real-life logistics of combining lives and families.

A man and a woman are pulled towards each by their immediate, obsessive attraction. From there they start the fragile process of forging a relationship — with their kids, their past divorces, and all their other baggage in tow. It doesn’t happen easily. There are jealousies, accusations, breakups, and the boredoms of the everyday mundane. But alongside them come unexpected pleasures, wonders — the complex mix of desires that somehow manage to keep a couple together, a love intact.

What I love about this novel is the tenderness and intimacy combined with raw sexuality, disturbing moments of disconnection, and occasional bouts of cruelty. That, and the fragmentary writing style — a bit like Dept. of Speculation, but way sexier, and not so depressing.

Get a copy of This Is Between Us now, or enter to win one by signing up for my newsletter to the right. Already signed up? Then you’re already entered!

Come back mid-month to read a Five Firsts interview with Kevin Sampsell!