Instructables has just posted its latest installment in its collection of HOWTOs inspired by my new novel Little Brother, a young adult book about hacker kids who use technology to win back their civil liberties from the Department of Homeland Security.

This week, it's instructions for building a simple device that will let you spot hidden "pinhole" video cameras:

With one hand, hold up the toilet paper tube to your eye. With your other hand, hold up the flashlight at about eye level and point it away from you. With one eye, look through the tube and scan the room. If there are any small points of light bouncing back, inspect it further. It might be a camera.

Link, Link to feed of Little Brother Instructables

A reader writes, "In preparation for the release of his newest book The Word of God, respected New Wave SF writer Thomas M. Disch (The Brave Little Toaster, Camp Concentration) has revealed himself to be God and is now taking questions from the faithful at his blog."

Dear G_d: Could you clarify the order of Creation? There are two different lists in Genesis, and people have died over interpretation. Please guide your humble flock.

PS: What did you do on the 8th Day?

The Aardvarks came first. Then the others, in alphabetical order. Except some of the really cute ones, like the panda, wheedled their way to the head of the line. And the zebra just stood there feeling this would be his lucky day.

Link

FolioSF has just published the French edition of my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, translated by Gilles Goullet under the title "Dans la dèche au Royaume Enchanté." It's available in fine stores throughout the French-speaking world, and, of course, on Amazon.fr. Link

Love these Japanese bookcase animal silhouette dividers -- $15 each, give or take. Link (via Cribcandy)

Sunday night, I fly to Chicago to kick off my three-week US book-tour for Little Brother, my new young adult novel. I'll be stopping in and around Chicago, Milwaukee, Seattle, San Francisco and (probably) New York. The schedule's still being firmed up, but Tor (my publisher) is keeping an up-to-the-minute schedule for each appearance. This is my first publisher-financed tour, and I'm incredibly excited! I hope to meet lots of you on the road! Link

Every time I put a book online for free, readers ask me how they can "tip" me for the download. The problem is, I'm not actually interested in tips, since these cut my publisher out of the loop, putting us on opposite sides of the free download equation. My publisher is extremely valuable to me, providing editorial and marketing and distribution services that I couldn't possibly provide on my own without spending a lot more of the cover-price of the book than currently goes to my publisher.

For Little Brother, I've come up with a solution that balances out my publishers' interests, my interests, the generosity of my readers, and the needs of educators and libraries.

Here's how it works: if you're a librarian, teacher (or similar -- someone who works in a halfway house, social center, or comparable institution), you can send in a request for a free copy of Little Brother. I'll post these, along with your institution's address, on a public web-page (I'm also vetting these to make sure that they really come from educators and affiliated trades, and not just cheap people who want someone else to buy them a copy of the book).

If you're someone who loved the ebook and wants to "tip" me, you can pay me back by checking out the list of teachers and suchlike in search of donated copies, and buy a copy directly for someone on the list, using Amazon, BN.com, Powell's, or your favorite mail-order house. Send in the email receipt (delete anything private first), and the teacher's entry will be marked as fulfilled.

I'm actually paying someone to manage this whole process, out of my own pocket. Olga Nunes, a friend and awesome web-developer, has agreed to take on the task of updating the page, vetting the entries, and answering your questions. You can reach her at freelittlebrother@gmail.com with your solicitations and/or donations.

So there it is: educators, librarians, social workers and other people who work with kids, send in your solicitations now! Generous ebook readers are waiting to send you free copies of my latest book! Link

Instructables has just posted the latest installment in its series of HOWTOs inspired by my latest novel, Little Brother, a young adult novel about hacker kids who fight the DHS with technology in order to restore the Bill of Rights to America.

This week, it's HOWTO build a spice-mister, a low-intensity edible pepper-spray to douse your food with (one of the characters in the book is a serious capsaicin junkie). Being the kind of guy who'd brush his teeth with Tobasco if I could, I love this one.

Putting the spice mister together is not hard. Simply remove the pump, fill with your choice of hot sauce, and put the pump back in.

To add a quick burst of intense flavor to your food, hold the mister a few inches above the dish and spray. Repeat until desirable heat is reached.

Keep it away from your face, and never spray at anyone else - capsaicin in the eyes hurts like hell. Pepper spray is nasty, evil stuff and should never, ever be used on anything except food.

Link, Link to feed for Little Brother Instructables

On the most recent Sound of Young America, podcast Jesse Thorn interviewed David Hadju, the author of The Ten Cent Plague, a book about the anti-comic book panic of the 1950s. Link

I've just put up my site for Little Brother, my young adult novel about hacker kids who use technology to reclaim the Bill of Rights from the DHS after a terrorist attack on San Francisco. Included on the site are:

• Creative Commons licensed downloads of the whole book
• An easy way to donate copies of the book to school classrooms
• Links to buy the book from various etailers (and an offer to get a signed, inscribed copy shipped direct to you by Borderlands Books in San Francisco)
• A place to put your remixes of the book
  

Still to come: the tour schedule, more Instructables HOWTOs, and lots of other news. Link

My editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, rang me yesterday to talk about a weird little phenomenon: people who were going to stores looking for my newest, Little Brother, were walking away unfulfilled because they were looking in the science fiction section, not the young adult section. Many of us grew up in an era before the young adult section -- when the kids' section in the store was just picture books and some 400-volume sharecropped series like Sweet Valley High. No longer -- practically every bookstore now sports a large (and growing) YA section filled with some of the most amazing work being done in any literary genre today.

Indeed, a quick browse through Boing Boing's archives turned up this (incomplete) set of links to my YA section, the young adult books I've loved and blogged here -- most of them are not available on the science fiction shelves of your local store, only in the YA section:

Scott Westerfeld: Pretties/Uglies; Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm: Good As Lilly; Daniel Pinkwater, Scott Westerfeld, Peeps, Jonathan Strahan (ed), The Starry Rift; John Varley: Rolling Thunder, John Varley: Red Thunder; John Varley: Red Thunder; Scott Westerfeld: Uglies, Michael de Larrabeiti: The Borribles; Justine Larbalastier: Magic's Child; Justine Larbalastier: Magic or Madness; Ragnar: Got Your Nose!; Philip Pullman: Northern Lights trilogy; Scott Westerfeld: So Yesterday; Scott Westerfeld: Midnighters trilogy; Kathe Koja: Going Under; Ellen Klages: Portable Childhoods; Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Jane Yolen (eds): The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens; Changeling, a fairy tale of contemporary New York;

Living in a space that no one watches too closely is one of the secret ways that people get to do excellent stuff. Science fiction's status for decades as a pariah genre meant that writers could do things with literary style, theme, and political content that their mainstream counterparts could never get away with (games, comics, early hip-hop, mashups, and many of the other back laneways of popular culture have also enjoyed this status). These days, a lot of the coolest stuff in the universe is happening in the kids' section of your bookstore (and yes, I'm aware of the irony of calling attention to a field that has prospered because it wasn't receiving too much attention to blossom).

So while there's a personal motive to this post -- letting you know where to find Little Brother at your bookstore -- there's also a general tip for living the happy mutant life: check out the YA section at the bookstore and see what's been going on under your nose!

Here's a little more on the subject from Patrick:

We've all been neglecting to include a very important piece of information: *if you want to buy a printed copy, you're going to have to go into the YA section.*

Some copies may wind up shelved in regular SF or general-fiction sections, but most bookstores are pretty rigorous these days: if it's published as YA, it goes into the YA section. As you know, Bob, we made a deliberate decision to publish it into the YA channel, not least because it's the kind of book we know *we* would have loved when we were 15. But it suddenly occurs to me that there are probably a lot of people who now have it in their heads to keep an eye out for *Little Brother* the next time they go into a bookstore...but that doesn't mean they're going to actually go into the section with all the chapter books, Narnia displays, Percy Jackson endcaps, and so forth.

Of course, if they do actually venture over that threshold, they may well discover a whole bunch of outstanding SF and fantasy that's been published onto those shelves in the last decade or so. Powerful SF novels like *Uglies* and *Peeps* by Scott Westerfeld, who John Scalzi calls "the most important contemporary SF author that most of the SF field has never heard of." Fantasy like Garth Nix's brilliant Abhorsen trilogy, or sui-generis novels of science and human character like Ellen Klages' *The Green Glass Sea*. It's almost as if there's an entire alternate world of good reading over there.

Last month, I mentioned Ann and Jeff Vandermeer's Steampunk anthology in passing, but the book deserves better than that. I've just spent several highly entertaining hours with my advance review copy and I'm knocked out. What a great piece of work this is, from the fascinating triumvirate of essays that recount the history of steampunk in literature and describe its contemporary appeal to the top-notch works of fiction inside, from forgotten proto-steampunk gems by Michael Moorcock and James Blaylock to contemporary pieces from Neal Stephenson, Jay Lake, Ted Chiang and Paul Di Filippo (among many others). Summer's almost here -- time to do some leisure reading, and what better place to start than here? Link

John Picacio's posted the transcript of his speech honoring Michael Moorcock on the occasion of Moorcock's being awarded the Science Fiction Writers of America's Grand Master title. Freddie adds, "the speech includes plaudits from Neil Gaiman, Chris Roberson, Jeff Vandermeer, Jeffrey Ford, China Mieville, and Alan Moore."

Our first message is from the author of AMERICAN GODS, the 2002 Nebula Award Winner for Best Novel -- Neil Gaiman.

Neil -- "Mike Moorcock changed the inside of my head. I read STORMBRINGER when I was nine, and that was pretty much that. My pocket money went on Moorcock books -- which were gloriously being issued and reissued back then -- and I read them and took what I could from them. It's not long until you have a multiverse in your twelve-year-old mind, and you learn that every hero is the Eternal Champion, and suddenly you're puzzling over Jerry Cornelius stories, with your head going places it hasn't gone before.

When people ask me about my influences, I tend to forget Mike, much in the way that people listing the things that were important to them growing up, fail to list the earth, the air, and sunlight. He taught me that high culture and low culture were simply points of view, and that what mattered was the writing. His influence as an editor still reverberates today. We're lucky to have him."

Link (Thanks, Freddie Freelance!)

The StarShipSofa podcast is metamorphosing into the StarShipSofa - The Audio Science Fiction Magazine, following in the great tradition of magazines like Analog, Asimov and Fantasy and Science Fiction. Tony sez,

Each week the StarShipSofa will deliver a full package of SF related audio material all free including audio fiction, fact audio essays, flash fiction and poetry, all by leading names in the SF field. Many many writers have agreed to let StarShipSofa narrate their works including Ben Bova, Joe Haldeman, Alistair Reynolds and M John Harrison to name a few.

There will be two shows per week, the Wednesday show, also know as Aural Delights will contain narrated audio fiction, fact and poetry and the weekend show will be an in depth look into an author's life and work.

This week saw the first of the metamorphosing with the StarShipSofa's Aural Delights show. Fiction was provided by Kage Baker's fantastic story The Likely Lad, there were two poems by Bruce Boston and Laurel Winter, both winners of the Rhysling Award for SF Poetry. Flash fiction came from a very short but very powerful story called Repeating The Past by Peter Watts, author of the SF novel Blindsight.

In the weeks to come Peter Watts will also be delivering a monthly narrated fact article; this part of the show will be called Reality, Remastered. As for the weekend shows, StarShipSofa has her sights upon writers such as John Scalzi, Robert Charles Wilson and Ken Macleod.

Link (Thanks, Tony!)

Just a reminder: tonight's the Toronto book-launch for Little Brother, my latest novel! It starts at 7PM at the Merril Collection (239 College St., east of Spadina).

BakkaPhoenix books will be selling books at the event, and they're also happy to take pre-orders for custom inscriptions -- CDN$19.95 for the book, plus $9 and GST for shipping in Canada, $15 to the US, $20 to Europe, and $25 to the rest of the world (BakkaPhoenix: 416 963 9993, inquiries@bakkaphoenixbooks.com). Link

O'Reilly's Make: Books launched a new series of books called DIY Science, and the first one is The Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiements, by Robert Bruce Thompson. Here's the preface to the book, which I found very inspiring.

Christmas morning, 1964. I was 11 years old. My younger brother and I arose at the crack of dawn and noisily rushed downstairs to find out what was under the tree. Our parents followed us, bleary-eyed.

Santa had been good to us that year. Colorfully-wrapped presents were scattered, not just under the tree, but across most of the living room floor. Being boys, we started tearing open the presents with no thought at all for the care that had gone into wrapping them. We were after the loot.

There were the inevitable disappointments. Sweaters from grandma, school clothes from Aunt Betty, and hand-knitted stocking caps for both of us from Pete and Sarah, our elderly next-door neighbors. But there was plenty of good stuff, too. Sports equipment and a cap pistol for my younger brother. A battery-powered Polaris nuclear submarine that actually fired small plastic missiles. A bicycle for my brother and a BB gun for me! Lots of books, the kind we both liked to read. A casting set, with a lead furnace and molds to make toy soldiers.

As we opened the packages, my brother and I mentally checked off items against our wish lists. We’d both gotten everything we asked for. Almost. One item had been at the top of every iteration of my wish list since the Sears Christmas Wish Book had arrived, and that item was nowhere to be found. I searched frantically through the piles of discarded wrapping paper, hoping I’d overlooked a box. It wasn’t there.

My parents had been watching my brother and me ripping through gifts like Tasmanian Devils. Just as I’d decided that I hadn’t gotten the one gift that I really, really wanted, mom and dad called me into the kitchen. There it sat, on the kitchen table, exactly what I’d been hoping for. It was already unboxed and spread wide open to show the contents. My father said, “This is from your mother and me. It is not a toy.”

It was a Lionel/Porter/Chemcraft chemistry set, and the exact model I’d asked for. The biggest one, with dozens of chemicals and hundreds of experiments. Glassware, an alcohol lamp, a balance, even a centrifuge. Everything I needed to do real chemistry. I instantly forgot about the rest of my presents, even the BB gun. I started reading the manual, jumping from one experiment to another. I carefully examined each of the chemical bottles. The names of the chemicals were magical. Copper sulfate, sodium carbonate, sulfur, cobalt chloride, logwood, potassium ferricyanide, ferrous ammonium sulfate, and dozens more.

Tor Books and Expanded Books produced a funny interview/trailer thing for John Scalzi and me in honor of our latest books -- he's bringing out a young adult novel in the Old Man's Warverse in August called Zoe's Tale that I've read a little from and it's dynamite! Link

My next novel, Little Brother, officially goes on sale today! In addition to the US print edition, there's a DRM-free audio edition (there're also forthcoming editions in the UK, Greece, Russia, France and Norway, with others pending) from Random House Audio. My deal with Random House is that they're absolutely not allowed to sell the book with DRM on it, which, sadly, means that Audible (the largest audiobook store in the world) won't carry it -- they insist on selling books with DRM, even when authors and publishers don't want it.

Instead, you can buy the audiobook from Zipidee, a retailer that Random House uses -- they have the spiffy embeddable Flash sales-object you see above (feel free to paste it into your own blog or whatnot), and there's also this static URL for those of you who can't use Flash.

The audiobook comes with my own sampling license: once you own it, you're free to take up to 30 minutes' worth of material from it and remix and then redistribute it as much as you like, provided that you do so on a noncommercial basis, make sure that it's clear that this is a remix and not the original, and make sure that you tell people where to find the original. This is in addition to all the fair use remixing that you're allowed to do without my permission (of course!).

I'll also be releasing (as always!) a free, Creative Commons-licensed version of the text of Little Brother, just as soon as I get back to London (I'm presently in Toronto, visiting my family with my newborn daughter). It'll likely be Monday or so -- there's a bunch of little clean-uppy things I need to do with the Little Brother distribution site that I need to be in my office with uninterrupted time to accomplish. Link to audiobook, Link to buy Little Brother

Hubert's Museum was a Times Square dime museum open from the mid-1920s until 1965. This cabinet of curiosities was an icon of sideshow culture, featuring a flea circus, sword swallowers, contortionists, and other fabulous freaks. During its later years, the museum was frequented by my favorite photographer, Diane Arbus. Indeed, that's where she met the awesome giant Eddie Carmel who stooped for a famed family portrait with his normal-sized parents. Recently, a rare book dealer named Bob Langmuir came to possess the personal papers of Charlie Lucas, a sideshow performer himself who served as a manager at Hubert's Museum. Among the papers were two dozen of Arbus's original photographs, worth around $100 when she was alive and now valued in the high six figures at least. A new book by Gregory Gibson, titled "Hubert's Freaks," tells the story of the Museum, Lucas, and Lagmuir's efforts to make big bucks of his find. I ordered a copy before even finishing the review of the book in yesterday's Los Angeles Times. From the LA Times:

During the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, Charlie Lucas presided over the "Darkest Africa" exhibit as "African Chief of the Duckbill Women," a.k.a. "WooFoo, the Immune Man." He wore a bone through his nose and swallowed fire. (The fair that year celebrated, without irony, a "Century of Progress.") He and his wife, the beautiful Woogie, eventually settled in New York, and Lucas found work managing Hubert's Museum, where Woogie performed her snake-charming act alongside the aforementioned Sealo, Professor Heckler's Flea Circus, Mildred the Alligator Skin Girl, a Russian midget named Andy Potato Chips and Eddie Carmel, the Jewish Giant.

Not incidentally, Lucas was befriended there by photographer Diane Arbus, who talked her way into the homes of his colleagues and shot what would later become iconic photos of, among others, Andy Potato Chips with two other midgets in his Uptown living room and Eddie Carmel bent beneath the ceiling of his Bronx apartment, his parents looking like frightened Lilliputians beside him.

So when Bob Langmuir -- the protagonist of Gibson's tale, a rare-book dealer and collector of African Americana -- happened across a trove of Lucas' papers, he had reason to be excited.

Link to buy Hubert's Freaks, Link to HubertsFreaks.com (Thanks, Mark F.!)

Voluminous is a subscription-based public domain book delivery program. Once you buy the app, it'll let you know whenever likely books are scanned and put online; they also keep a bookmarkable library for you.

There are literally tens of thousands of books. Voluminous makes it faster and easier to find the ones you want. Would you rather waste your time hunting around for them, or have Voluminous do it for you?

Voluminous also:

* Will tell you when new books are available
* Keeps automatic bookmarks for each book in your personal library. If you read a book on a webpage, your web browser will only bookmark that web page (typically, the start of the book), not where you've read to.
* Tracks which books you're currently reading, for quick access
* Takes "plain text" and turns it into a beautifully laid-out book in the style you choose
* Offers full-screen mode for distraction-free reading
* Has tools to share interesting books with friends

These are just some of the advantages of using Voluminous.

Link (via Wonderland)

Woohoo! I'm on the Locus Award ballot -- twice! Once for Best Novella for my story After the Siege and again for Best Collection for my book Overclocked. Thanks to everyone who voted for me! I'm in damned good company too -- if you're looking for a masterclass in contemporary sf, this would be the place to start:

SF NOVEL
The Accidental Time Machine, Joe Haldeman (Ace)
Brasyl, Ian McDonald (Pyr)
Halting State, Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit UK)
Spook Country, William Gibson (Putnam; Viking UK)
The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon (HarperCollins)

FANTASY NOVEL
Endless Things, John Crowley (Small Beer Press; Overlook)
Making Money, Terry Pratchett (Doubleday UK; HarperCollins)
Pirate Freedom, Gene Wolfe (Tor)
Territory, Emma Bull (Tor)
Ysabel, Guy Gavriel Kay (Viking Canada; Roc)

Link

Instructables have just published their latest installment in their series of HOWTOs inspired by my forthcoming novel Little Brother, a young adult book about kids who use technology to wrest liberty from the Department of Homeland Security. This week, it's HOWTO block or kill an RFID chip.

-The easiest way to kill an RFID, and be sure that it is dead, is to throw it in the microwave for 5 seconds. Doing this will literally melt the chip and antenna making it impossible for the chip to ever be read again. Unfortunately this method has a certain fire risk associated with it. Killing an RFID chip this way will also leave visible evidence that it has been tampered with, making it an unsuitable method for killing the RFID tag in passports. Doing this to a credit card will probably also screw with the magnetic strip on the back making it un-swipeable.

-The second, slightly more convert and less damaging, way to kill an RFID tag is by piercing the chip with a knife or other sharp object. This can only be done if you know exactly where the chip is located within the tag. This method also leaves visible evidence of intentional damage done to the chip, so it is unsuitable for passports.

-The third method is cutting the antenna very close to the chip. By doing this the chip will have no way of receiving electricity, or transmitting its signal back to the reader. This technique also leaves minimal signs of damage, so it would probably not be a good idea to use this on a passport.

-The last (and most covert) method for destroying a RFID tag is to hit it with a hammer. Just pick up any ordinary hammer and give the chip a few swift hard whacks. This will destroy the chip, and leave no evidence that the tag has been tampered with. This method is suitable for destroying the tags in passports, because there will be no proof that you intentionally destroyed the chip.

Link, Link to RSS feed for Little Brother Instructables

See also: HOWTO Screen-print a tee

In the current New Yorker, anthropologist Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, looks at the vengeance practices of tribal societies in New Guinea. While Diamond was conducting field work in the New Guinea Highlands, he was driven around by a young man named Daniel Wemp of the Handa clan. The two got to talking and Daniel recounted how he avenged the death of his uncle who had been killed by the neighboring Ombal clan. The tale is amazing, insightful, and gets you thinking about our own, er, taste for revenge. From the New Yorker article, titled "Vengeance Is Ours":

The war between the Handa clan and the Ombal clan began many years ago; how many, Daniel didn’t say, and perhaps didn’t know. It could easily have been several decades ago, or even in an earlier generation. Among Highland clans, each killing demands a revenge killing, so that a war goes on and on, unless political considerations cause it to be settled, or unless one clan is wiped out or flees. When I asked Daniel how the war that claimed his uncle’s life began, he answered, “The original cause of the wars between the Handa and Ombal clans was a pig that ruined a garden.” Surprisingly to outsiders, most Highland wars start ostensibly as a dispute over either pigs or women. Anthropologists debate whether the wars really arise from some deeperlying ultimate cause, such as land or population pressure, but the participants, when they are asked to name a cause, usually point to a woman or a pig. Any Westerner who knows the story of Helen and the Trojan War will not be surprised to hear women named as a casus belli, but the equal importance of pigs is less obvious. However, New Guinea Highlanders, whose main food staples are starchy root crops like sweet potato and taro, are chronically starved for protein, of which the island’s dark, bristly pigs traditionally furnished the only large source. As a result, pigs are prized symbols of prestige and wealth. Peaceful competition and ostentatious displays involve pigs, and they are also used as currency for buying women. Pigs are individually owned and named, and, as piglets, they are sometimes nursed at one breast by a woman nursing an infant at her other breast.

A typical Highland village is a cluster of huts housing between a few dozen and a few hundred people plus their pigs, traditionally surrounded by a fence, and situated a mile or a few miles from the next village. A village’s pigs are taken out to forage during the day, and are prone then to wander into people’s vegetable gardens, breaking down or digging under fences erected to keep them out. A single pig can root up and ruin an entire garden in a few hours. If the intrusion happens at night, or if the offending pig is not caught in the act, it is virtually impossible to prove which particular pig was responsible.

That was how the Handa-Ombal war began. An Ombal man found that his garden had been wrecked by a pig. He claimed that the offending pig belonged to a certain Handa man, who denied it. The Ombal man became angry, demanded compensation, and assaulted the Handa pig owner when he refused. Relatives of both parties then joined in the dispute, and soon the entire membership of both clans—between four and six thousand people—was dragged into a war that had now raged for longer than Daniel could remember. He told me that, in the four years of fighting leading up to Soll’s death, seventeen other men had been killed.

Link

Next Thursday, May 1, I'll be launching my next novel, Little Brother, at Toronto's Merril Collection, at 7PM. Little Brother's my first young adult novel, a book about young people who use technology to fight for the restoration of the Bill of Rights to American politics, setting them square in the crosshairs of the war on terror.

BakkaPhoenix books will be selling books at the event, and they're also happy to take pre-orders for custom inscriptions -- CDN$19.95 for the book, plus $9 and GST for shipping in Canada, $15 to the US, $20 to Europe, and $25 to the rest of the world (BakkaPhoenix: 416 963 9993, inquiries@bakkaphoenixbooks.com). Link

Cole sez, "Maureen F. McHugh's speculative fiction collection MOTHERS & OTHER MONSTERS has been released online by Small Beer Press as a free Creative Commons download."

Small Beer is knocking them out of the park with CC releases by some of science fiction's most talented, most brilliant short fiction writers. An entire Maureen McHugh collection online gratis is a watershed event. Link (Thanks, Cole!)

See also:
Kelly Link's gorgeous short story collection now a CC download
John Kessel's wonderful short story collection "The Baum Plan" free CC download

Very Short List is a daily email recommending one excellent, but