SF Signal has a page collecting links works from this year’s Hugo nomination list that are online for free. This is a great chance to read some of the year’s best speculative fiction - nearly all the nominated novellas, novelettes and short stories are online, and Harper Collins has even put up a substantial preview (71 pages) of Michael Chabon’s alternate history novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

Out of the stories I’ve read so far, I particularly enjoyed Ted Chiang’s The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate (time travel, Arabian Nights style - also available as a free mp3 podcast episode from Starship Sofa) and Nancy Kress’ The Fountain of Age, a clever and affecting piece of science fiction.

Link

The Guardian has an exclusive excerpt from Philip Pullman’s latest book, Once Upon a Time in the North, which takes place in the same world as his acclaimed His Dark Materials trilogy and a few decades earlier.

The most interesting thing was the bears. The first time Lee saw one slouching casually out of an alley he could scarcely believe his eyes. Gigantic, ivory-furred, silent: the creature’s expression was impossible to read, but there was no mistaking the immense power in those limbs, those claws, that air of inhuman self-possession. There were more of them further into town, gathered in small groups at street corners, sleeping in alleyways, and occasionally working: pulling a cart, or lifting blocks of stone on a building site.

The townspeople took no notice of them, except to avoid them on the pavement. They didn’t look at them either, Lee noticed.

“They want to pretend they’re not there,” said Hester.

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Paul Graham Raven of Futurismic writes:

Regular readers will be familiar with the Friday Flash Fictioneers from Futurismic’s free fiction round-ups. We’ve teamed up and collected over sixty of our best flash stories from the last nine months, and yours truly has edited them into ILLUMINATIONS, all profits from which will be donated to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children here in the UK.

ILLUMINATIONS is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial licence - the stories are already out there in the magical tubes of the internets, so we thought we’d like to set them free formally at the same time as making them available in one convenient and attractive package!

ILLUMINATIONS will be available in book form from Odd Two Out Publishing after 25th March 2008 (or from the authors themselves) for GB£6.99, or as a downloadable PDF for an as yet unannounced price.

Link to full announcement at Futurismic.com

The Times has a Christmas list of thrillers that are must reads. These novels include:

• The Ghost by Robert Harris
• Spook Country by William Gibson
  
• The Painter of Battles by Arturo Perez-Reverte
• Swansea Teminal by Robert Lewis
  
• Devil’s Peak by Deon Meyer
• Conned by Matthew Klein
• The Lying Tongue by Andrew Wilson

View the full article (which includes a brief description of each of the books) here.

Everyone wants to read a bestseller. Why not? The New York Times Bestseller Lists can help you see the books that are currently on top sales.

There are usually 8 categories from Hardcover Fiction to Paperback Non-Fiction. On the Children’s Book List, STAR WARS POP-UP GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, by Matthew Reinhart tops the list.

View the full NY Times Bestseller Lists here.

The New York Times released their “10 best books of 2007″ list, which includes five novels:

• Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas
• Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
• The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
• Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
• Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

View the full article (which includes a brief descriptions of each of the books) here.

Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing writes:

Vernor Vinge has put the entire text of his magnificent, prescient, mind-alteringly good novel Rainbows End online as a free download. This was one of the best books of 2006, a book that practically defines what “post-cyberpunk” really means: stories about what happens when the world (and not the street) finds its own use for technology.

The book is in html format, which means that it can be converted to any number of formats (.txt, .pdb, .pdf…) and read on any open platform - palm pilots, phones, computers, ebook readers et cetera.

Link to html file; link to Rainbows End’s Amazon page

The New York Times put up their 100 Notable Books of the Year list for 2007, which includes final Harry Potter novel and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, among many others. View it here.