The Price Is Right: Free Ebooks (Amazon.com/German Edition)

For me personally one of the biggest events in 3+ years of ebook reading was the opening of Amazon.de a couple of weeks ago, and it has implications for anyone who reads German anywhere. In anticipation of the opening, Amazon began working to improve access to public-domain material in German (and is clearly taking parallel steps in the run-up to the launch of its French Kindle shop). I spent hours yesterday going through free German-language offerings at Amazon.de and Amazon.com and came up with links to significant ebooks that you would have been hard pressed to find at any price a few months ago. (I'll propose some comparable links to material in English and French in other posts, especially as the French-language selection improves. Today's links are all to Amazon.com, i.e., for U.S. and international use; if anyone wants the corresponding links to Amazon.de, please message me via Facebook [badge in right-hand column of this blog].)

It's long been possible to find German-language literary classics, especially the older ones, on the Internet, e.g. at Gutenberg. Here are new options, often for harder-to-find material, all of it 'nonfiction'. (My apologies for 'disappearing' material and any broken links.)

Where, realistically, might a person start reading Hegel? Consider the theoretical introduction to his lectures on the philosophy of history, the introduction popularly known as 'Reason in History'. Digital offerings of Hegel used to be sparse or expensive: yesterday the Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte were free but today they are not to be found. I suggest you try another search in the future... or go with 'the big one', Phänomenologie des Geistes. [UPDATE 12 June 2011: The Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte are now back in the Amazon database and are currently free.]

And Marx? In the strange absence of a German ebook edition of Das Kapital, consider either one of the multiple free editions of the Communist Manifesto or my pick (made available last year as an ebook but only now for free), the Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte (also known as the Paris Manuscripts) of 1844; best known for their development of the theory of alienation, they are the cream of the young Marx. [UPDATE 8 November 2011: Note that the full German text of all three volumes of Das Kapital is now available as an ebook--not free, but as a very reasonably priced ebook from Amazon.com or Amazon.de.]

Nietzsche's works published during his lifetime have long been readily available as ebooks (now free); his indispensable posthumous writings of the 1880s, best known under the titles Der Wille zur Macht or The Will to Power and often the victims of editorial error or distortion, were available yesterday in five free ebook volumes entitled Fragmente but have disappeared again. [UPDATE 12 June 2011: These, too, are now back in the database, and all five are currently free. Search Kindle books for nietzsche fragmente .] Consider instead the earlier posthumous fragment Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne.

Freud is even more slippery, at least for now. The downloads that I would like to recommend (Die Traumdeutung and two case histories) are ineligible here because they cost 99 cents apiece. The most enduringly indispensable of the free options is probably Das Unheimliche, but, if you're looking for introductions to psychoanalytic theory for lay readers, consider Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens and Über Psychoanalyse.

Kafka's novels and short stories have long been available as free downloads: surf his pages at Amazon.com and regale yourself. Don't miss this new free ebook, though, Tagebücher 1910-1923, or this old--is 'favorite' really the right word?--Brief an den Vater.

I found a single work by Georg Lukács among the free German-language ebooks, but it's a fundamental (pre-Marxist) one, Theorie des Romans (1916). (I suspect that there are few readers who will find themselves in perfect agreement with Lukács in any of his books, but the same may be true of most of the writers in this list--indeed, of most of the writers we find indispensable.)

Finally, Walter Benjamin entered the public domain only recently in most of the world. My sentimental pick of a Benjamin volume to recommend here is his anthology Deutsche Menschen, subtitled 'eine Folge von Briefen', compiled with commentary by Benjamin. There are other important Benjamin ebooks, especially for two or three dollars, but Deutsche Menschen is the sort of powerful document that comes along only once....

The World Feels a Bit Smaller: Kindle Shop at Amazon.de

Readers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland now have their own Kindle Shop, and in a small way Jascha Writes is part of it. A Kiss Before You Leave Me is for sale there, I have a new German-language author page, and you can even link from this blog to purchase a Kindle from Amazon.de. Kindle apps for computers, smartphones and tablets are available there as well, at no charge. (A Kindle Shop for France and Belgium is expected later this year.) A special 'Welcome!', now and always, to all readers internationally.

I'm Flattered (I Think)

When I mentioned Goodreads the other day, I didn't know that two characters from my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me, Miranda Kincaid and Jack Emery, were being mentioned there as nominees for 'character you most want to sleep with' in Goodreads' Listopia section. When I heard the news, my first reaction was to feel flattered, and not just because the plot is premised in part on the predictable (mutual) desirability of these two lovers. Having your characters chosen feels a bit like being chosen yourself. It wasn't until the next day that I felt like asking the reader(s) in question, 'But what would your [spouse, ex, mother, mother-in-law, AA sponsor--there are too many choices, aren't there?, and that's just counting the ones that are 'suggested' by the novel]--what would they say? Do?' Or, better (or worse), 'Do you mean to tell me that, even knowing what you know now, you'd still...?'

Ah, the unexpected pleasures of authorship! If nothing else, this business at Goodreads will serve as a gentle reminder to me to return, as promised, to the question of bovarysme (identification)....

Steven Pressfield: An Offer Too Good to Pass Up

As the author of the novel Gates of Fire, Steven Pressfield has long inspired the sort of readerly enthusiasm otherwise reserved for those other chroniclers of Thermopylae, Herodotus and Frank Miller. But to 'creatives', and especially at least occasionally 'blocked creatives', he's another kind of hero: his book The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle helps writers, artists--and all of us who have trouble embracing whatever unique contributions we can make--understand and cope with Resistance. (If you usually shy away from 'self-help' books, Pressfield may be the writer to change your mind.)

Pressfield's follow-up to The War of Art is an Amazon exclusive due out a week from today--but you can reserve a free digital copy for your Kindle if you act now. The new book is called Do the Work.

Take the link, check it out, pre-order, read.

Then do the work.

William Faulkner Goes Digital

It's a bad sign (for me) that a couple of years ago when I was throwing together a list of my favorite authors (who have since turned up here under the label '26' and might be named elsewhere as 'influences', when I get around to filling out the rest of my author profile at Goodreads) it never even occurred to me to mention Faulkner. Was I taking him for granted? True, I've probably reread only two of his novels in the last 15 years (another bad sign for me), but he was the first contemporary author I can remember buying in hardback as a teenager and was definitely the first author I taught as a graduate student (one of several TAs, that semester, to Faulkner scholar Cleanth Brooks). And my admiration for Faulkner has never wavered.

I'm happy to see that Random House is finally issuing almost all of Faulkner's novels in ebook format this year--one conspicuous exception being Sanctuary, which must after all this time still not be considered 'respectable' enough. Now, the biggest bargain of the lot (three novels for $14.99) has been moved up so as to be first out of the gate next week (alongside a fine collection of Faulkner's 'essays, speeches and public letters'): the Snopes trilogy (made up of The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion).

There's even some Faulkner you can sample for free online: his 1956 Paris Review interview is available in its entirety, and, if you have access to an iPad and iBooks, you can download a very generous sample of Snopes now at the iBookstore. (Other ebook retailers will provide samples next week.)

ADDED 20 APRIL 2011: This morning Random House added an attractive third Faulkner title to today's ebook releases: the selected short stories (as published in the Modern Library). So far, this ebook is available for download only at Apple's iBookstore. The much more ample collected short stories (like the heretofore omitted Sanctuary) will be available in ebook format next month, according to the Random House website.