Grasping for the Wind

Free Fiction: Dawnthief by James Barclay

Download a copy of James Barclay's Dawnthief in the dreaded PDF format from The Book Depository.

[Via Fantasy Book News & Reviews]

Free Fiction: Jane Lindskold's The Buried Pyramid

Tor continues to bring the goods with Jane Lindskold's The Buried Pyramid.

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=9263

[Requires free Tor.com registration]

Free Fiction and more: Book View Cafe

From the site's about us:

Book View Cafe is a new approach to publishing made possible by the Internet. While most of the fiction on the site is free, authors will also be offering expanded work, additional content, print versions, or subscriptions for a fee. Our authors are all professionals with publishing credits in the print world. The Internet is giving us an opportunity to make their out-of-print, experimental, or otherwise unavailable work to you.

Every day, new content available nowhere else will be served up on Book View Cafe: short stories, flash fiction, poetry, episodes of serialized novels, and maybe even a podcast now and then. The content will be archived and available after the posting date by visiting the author's bookshelf.

Sounds awesome!

Current authors are:

Maya Kaathryn Bahnhoff
Brenda Clough
Katie Daniel
Laura Anne Gilman
Christie Golden
Anne Harris
Sylvia Kelso
Katharine Eliska Kimbriel
Sue Lange
Ursula K. Le Guin
Rebecca Lickiss
Vonda N. McIntyre
Nancy Jane Moore
Pati Nagle
Darcy Pattison
Irene Radford
Madeleine Robins
Amy Sterling
Jennifer Stevenson
Susan Wright
Sarah Zettel

There is also a blog.

[Via SF Signal]

Free Fiction: Dragon Moon Press

Dragon Moon Press is a small sole proprietorship publishing house run by Gwen Gades that has managed to gather a few notables to its list of publications. Even better, several of these are available for a free pdf download at the website/blog.

The current list of free fiction includes:

* Alien Deception by Tony Ruggiero
* Alien Revelation by Tony Ruggiero
* Chalice of Life by Karen Anne Webb
* Darwin's Paradox by Nina Munteanu
* Lachlei by M. H. Bonham
* Small Magics by Eric Buchanan
* Sojoun by Jana G. Oliver [FMBOTYA Editor's Choice Winner] (Time Rovers BK1)
* The Darkling Band by Jason Henderson
* The Gryphon Highlord by Connie Ward (Gold Winner)
* The Longevity Thesis by Jennifer Rahn
* Virtual Evil by Jana G. Oliver (Time Rovers BK2)

All look interesting, but for sure Jennifer Rahn, Jana G. Oliver and Tony Ruggiero are up and comers in the sf world you should be sure to download.

Free Fiction: Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow

Podiobooks has the entire podcast of Cory Doctorow's novel of warring time zones available for free download. [free registration required]

Free Fiction: Five Classic Ghost Stories from Juno Books

Juno Books - publisher of some really great fiction with powerful female protagonists - is offering a free pdf download of some classic ghost stories from some notable authors.

The contents are:

Let Loose, Mary Cholmondeley (1890)
The Striding-Place, Gertrude Atherton (1896)
The Lost Ghost. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1903)
Kerfol, Edith Wharton (1916)
Spunk, Zora Neale Hurston (1925)

Its worth a download for the Wharton and Hurston alone.

Free Fiction: Spaceman Blues by Brian Francis Slattery

Tor has a new ebook available for download. This time it is Spaceman Blues by Brian Francis Slattery.Same rules apply as always for Tor downloads.

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=7457

Free Fiction: Charlie Huston's Caught Stealing

At Monsters and Critics, you can both download a free pdf AND enter to win a hard copy of Charlie Huston's Caught Stealing, a humorous crime noir. It isn't fantasy, like Huston's newer books - but you still might like it, and hey, it's free.

"This polished debut promises a bright future for Huston and definitely belongs on every Elmore Leonard fan's to-read list. One note of caution: Lovers of mystery-solving felines should place paws over eyes during the hair-raising cat torture scene." - Booklist *Starred Review

The contest is for US residents only, but the pdf is for anyone. And stay tuned, becasue M&C are giving away two more of Huston's novels in the series that Caught Stealing begins."

You can download Caught Stealing right now and for the rest of this month; November will be a free download of Six Bad Things and December a free download of A Dangerous Man.

http://www.monstersandcritics.com/books/news/article_1438088.php/Charlie_Huston_returns_to_book_shelves_and_M%26C_is_getting_fans_ready

Via The Swivet.

Free Fiction: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

This only sort of qualifies as free fiction, but you can watch eight stories plus more content being read from The Graveyard Book by the author himself.

http://www.mousecircus.com/videotour.aspx

This in includes the story "The Witch's Headstone which I reviewed after reading the Wizards anthology.

The Book Trailer - Narrated by Gaiman:

Gaiman explains the idea behind posting it online:

Free Fiction: Magic For Beginners by Kelly Link

Small Beer Press offers Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners for free download. Click HERE.

To celebrate the publication of Kelly's new collection, Pretty Monsters, most of Kelly's previous collection Magic for Beginners is now available as a free download in various completely open formats with no Digital Rights Management (DRM) strings attached. It is licensed under a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0) license allowing readers to share the stories with friends and generally have at them in any noncommercial manner.

Via Futurismic.

Free Fiction: 365 Tomorrows

I was browsing the internets and came across this really cool new fiction site. Called 365 tomorrows, it publishes flash fiction each and every day of the year. For those who don't know what flash fiction is, the site has a very good explanation.

"A busy reader may resist a lengthy story and return to their budgets and spreadsheets, but at 600 words or less, flash fiction requires less time than a trip to the water cooler. The writing has been acid-scorched and only the essential remains: without the inconvenience of length, the reader will follow a story to the final paragraph."

In addition to online reading, they also have a podcast format as well. If you like really short fiction, good for those five minutes breaks you are allowed by law, this might be a good site to have ready.

Or if you a writer, it's a new place to submit your work, which they have made easy with a simple submission form.

Good stuff, I think I may add it to my RSS reader, alongside J. Freivald's Flash Fiction Online.

Free Fiction: Read Afterlife at DouglasClegg.com

Although this book is only available online, not for download, I still thought it worth a mention. I believe that it is also printable.

Afterlife is a gothic thriller about Julie Hutchinson, a woman driven to the edge of sanity when a brutal murder ignites a series of psychic invasions at her home.

I've not read any Douglas Clegg myself, so I can't recommend it, but it sounds like the type of fiction some of you might like.

Free Fiction: Free e-books from Will Shetterly and Emma Bull at Tor.com

Download in various formats War for the Oaks by Emma Bull and Dogland by Will Shetterly just by becoming a registered user at Tor.com.

Registration is HERE.

The downloads are HERE.

Free Books: TOW Books

TOW Books is giving away free (limited amount) hard copies and ad infinitum e-books of their humor books. See HERE for the details.

Basically, the publisher got tired of sending books to quote/unquote "reputable" reviewers and getting no press whatsoever, so he is giving the books to readers instead. I guess they have learned the lesson that all press is good press. So if you ask for a book, you have to be sure and say something about it somewhere, even if it is only one sentence. Pretty good deal.

The downloads can be found HERE.

Free Fiction: Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman and Odalisque by Fiona McIntosh

Want some free fiction?

Check out

Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere

or

Fiona McIntosh's Odalisque: Book one of the Percheron Saga

Jim C. Hines The Stepsister Scheme first chapter available

The Goblin Books were awesome, now see what Jim C. Hines does with his brand of wit and humor to the traditional fairy-tale princess. Sure to be good for a lot of laughs.

Flash Fiction: Paul S. Kemp

Paul S. Kemp has posted a great piece of flash fiction over at his Livejournal. Read, read I say!