Cyber Monday Book Deals: Open Road Media

[coffeeandink]

I don't plan on posting on deals/coupons that often, but -- holiday season consumerism, what you gonna do?

Open Road Media has discounted all its books by 80%, which is breaking my heart only because I spent Thanksgiving weekend using my Kobo coupons on their Christina Stead reprints and still paid more.

How this works: Kobo is making you use a coupon, 80Cyber, which you can use for multiple books. If the book is already discounted (and most of Open Road Media's are), this means you actually get 80% off the discount price, so you're paying a little less than you are elsewhere. Kobo also has a bunch of other discount incentives for other publishers; if you want any ebooks from Melville House for example, this might be a good time to see if the 50Cyber coupon applies.

Amazon and BN have just marked the prices down, which means most of them are $2-3.

Some Open Road Media authors I recommend:

• Octavia Butler
  Kindred, from another publisher, is also 50% with the Cyber50 coupon at Kobo.
  
• Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
  I'd particularly commend Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers, an anthology with stories by Storm Constantine, Delia Sherman(*), Elizabeth Wein(*), Doris Egan(*), Neil Gaiman, Kelly Eskridge(*), Bruce Glassco(*), and others. (*) = my favorites. The Elizabeth Wein story is a Winter Prince prequel about Medraut and Morgause that is much darker than the novels.
  
• Barbara Hambly
  
• Virginia Hamilton
  
• Elizabeth Hand
  
• Dorothy Sayers
  
• Christina Stead
  I only discovered Christina Stead through Angela Carter's essays:
  
  To open a book, any book, by Christina Stead and read a few pages is to be at once aware that one is in the presence of greatness. Yet this revelation is apt to precipitate a sense of confusion, of strangeness, of anxiety, not only because Stead has a rare capacity to flay the reader's sensibilities, but also because we have grown accustomed to the idea that we live in pygmy times. To discover that a writer of so sure and unmistakable a stature is still amongst us, and, more, produced some of her most remarkable work as recently as the 1960s and 1970s, is a chastening thing ...
  
  I am going to wimp out on writing up The Man Who Loved Children and just direct you to Katha Pollitt and Marjorie Williams' discussion at Slate.
  
  In terms of triggers: There is no child molestation in the book. There is physical abuse, emotional abuse, and criminal neglect. What I remember most is parents using children as props in their own psychodramas, and a profoundly dysfunctional marriage that probably includes physical abuse (on both sides) and references to dubious consent (it's not clear, but the stepmother Henny is extremely bitter at having been forced to endure multiple pregnancies).
  
  I'm not doing a great job of selling this. It is one of the greatest novels about childhood I have ever read. Actually, it is one of the greatest novels I have ever read -- it should be just as well-known as Ulysses or To the Lighthouse as a classic of twentieth-century literature in English. It is overwhelming, extravagant, glittering, bitter, and furious. Stead applies a gimlet eye to everything, from the beauties of the Maryland shore to the precise emotional flow of every single interaction of a household tearing its members apart.
  
  
• Alice Walker
  My love for In Search of My Mother's Gardens is too personal for me to talk about much, so ... that's all I feel able to say about that.
  
• Donald Westlake
  
• Patricia C. Wrede & Caroline Stevermer
  

... This list is tiring me out, so I am going to stop.

But I will mention that the revised ebook version of Janet Mullany's unusual Regency romance Dedication is currently $.99 at Amazon. Loretta Chase also recently released her traditional Regency backlist as ebooks for $2.99 each.


cups brewed at DW