Open Road Media continues to release good backlist titles as ebooks. Coming this month are several titles by British novelist Barbara Pym, among them Jane and Prudence, No Fond Return of Love, and A Glass of Blessings. Also scheduled for January are a number of titles by James M. Cain; while he's best known for Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Mildred Pierce, his later work is well worth checking out -- The Institute, The Magician's Wife, and Rainbow's End are among the Cain titles due in January. And this month will see three of William Goldman's best novels: Marathon Man (for my money the finest thriller of the 70s, and if you know this one only from the movie be advised the book is a LOT better), Boys and Girls Together, and The Temple of Gold (his first novel); Goldman is known today mainly as a screenwriter, and his best known book is the delightful The Princess Bride, but before he began spending most of his time on scripts he was primarily a novelist, and the Open Road releases coming this month are three of his best. I've written about Goldman in this space before and you can find that post here.
Not long ago, I noted that the entire Travis McGee series by John D. MacDonald would be released as ebooks this month; even more of MacDonald's backlist will be coming to the Amazon Kindle store in June. 34 titles, among them The Damned, Murder in the Wind, The End of the Night, April Evil, The Deceivers, Cancel All Our Vows, and Cry Hard, Cry Fast. When these are released, most of MacDonald's backlist will be available as ebooks; still not scheduled are MacDonald classics like The Executioners (aka Cape Fear), A Flash of Green, and End of the Tiger -- with any luck by the end of 2013 they'll all be available.
UPDATE, Jan 6 -- End of the Tiger, one of MacDonald's short story collections, is now listed in the Kindle store as a June release; this one's worth grabbing for the title story alone.
Impending bankruptcy has never looked so good...
A brief commercial: for the next few months my own ebooks will be available exclusively in the Amazon Kindle store; right now they're not available at Smashwords, B&N, or Sony, but they may be back there this summer. The Kindle editions are sold without DRM so you should be able to read them on other devices as well.
I'll be running a free promotion on one of those titles this weekend, Jan 5-6. For these two days The Other Iron River, and Other Stories will be free at the Kindle store; the collection includes three stories: "Acts of Faith," "Ghost Writer," and "The Other Iron River." You get zombies, a ghost story, and in the title piece, a time travel story that I like to think catches a little of the Jack Finney/Twilight Zone feel. Grab it while the price is right, and I hope you'll enjoy it.
And bests to all.
