Yahoo Finance 24 Great Books—and One Reading Subscription—That Are on Sale for Prime Day
- 1/16
24 Great Books—and One Reading Subscription—That Are on Sale for Prime Day
When you think about Prime Day deals, chances are you think about Instant Pots, televisions, and dirt-cheap Alexa devices. But behind every flashy gadget deal is a lesser-known sale you can’t afford to miss. Because Prime Day isn’t just about tech or cookware—it also means seriously slashed prices on books. The jury’s still out on which books will go on sale on Prime Day 2021, but lucky for us, Amazon already released some deals.
We’ve taken the liberty of weeding through Amazon’s early Prime Day offerings to bring you the best discounted books to scoop up right now. We’ve also scouted deals on books we love here at Esquire that are ringing in at way less than the list price right now. Whether you like to read on paper or listen via audiobook, don’t waste any time—get shopping before the books sell out, and you’ll be reading on a beach before you know it.
Courtesy - 2/16
The Great Passage, by Shion Miura
Amazon Crossing
amazon.com
$10.26
Translated from the original Japanese, this prize-winning novel traces the thirteen-year process of making a dictionary, as observed through the lives of the publishers and linguists hard at work on the 2,900-page tome. As they collaborate on this labor of love, the novel’s characters unearth poignant truths about how words are a living thing—and the very foundation of our lives. Snag it now for 26 percent off as an early Prime Day deal, then check out the feature film and animated television series.
amazon.com - 3/16
Life, by Lu Yao
Amazon Crossing
amazon.com
$10.44
At long last, we have an English translation of the novella that swept China off its feet. Though Lao published only two books in his lifetime, both were considered masterpieces, catapulting him to national celebrity and earning him the prestigious Mao Dun Literature Prize. In the semi-autobiographical Life, we meet Gao Jialin, a community teacher at an agonizing crossroads: move to the city after his job is terminated and leave his first love, or stay in his rural village, where life is familiar and comfortable? When Gao Jialin rejects rural life and falls in love with a cityslicker, a surprise visit from his first love causes his two lives to clash. Evocatively imagined and resistant to easy answers, Life is a masterful meditation on transformation: personal, professional, and national.
amazon.com - 4/16
Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming
Thomas & Mercer
amazon.com
$11.99
All twelve of Fleming’s James Bond novels—and the two short story collections in which Bond appears—are listed on Amazon as early Prime Day deals, clocking in at 25 percent off. Whether you’re a collector looking to round out your bookshelf or a newbie to the franchise, this is the most cost-efficient way to stock up. Start your journey with Casino Royale, the unforgettable novel that introduced 007 to the world, changing spy fiction forever.
amazon.com - 5/16
World Travel, by Laurie Woolever
Ecco Press
amazon.com
$21.00
In World Travel, longtime Anthony Bourdain collaborator Laurie Woolever uses ephemera from Bourdain’s life on screen and in letters to produce a foodie travel guide to over forty countries. Bourdain’s charms loom as large as ever, with his powers of observation turned toward everything from the fish markets of Seoul to Oaxacan sauces. If you haven’t resumed traveling yet, take an imagined gourmand’s journey in your mind, courtesy of Bourdain’s inside scoop. When you’ve finished reading, check out our interview with Woolever, who explained how she stitched her late friend’s words into something new.
amazon.com - 6/16
A Promised Land, by Barack Obama
Crown
amazon.com
$23.23
The biggest book of 2020 was Barack Obama’s long-awaited memoir, a doorstopper that made headlines with its record-breaking $65 million advance. In these eloquent 768 pages, Obama provides powerful reflection on the state of the American project, along with key insights and new information about pivotal moments in the Obama Administration. A Promised Land spans Obama’s early political career in Chicago, his history-making presidential run in 2008, and concludes with the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011. With 768 pages ahead of you, it’s best to start sooner rather than later.
amazon.com - 7/16
Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam
Ecco Press
amazon.com
$11.75
Before Alam’s outstanding third novel becomes a Netflix series, read the book, which is currently over half off. In this white-knuckled story, a white family’s getaway to a rented Hamptons home is disrupted by the midnight arrival of an older Black couple, who claim to own the home and ask to stay the night, as New York City has become shrouded in total darkness during an ominous blackout. With an apocalypse looming outside their walls, together the two families must endure an uncomfortable dark night of the soul, wrestling with their suspicions of one another while forming fragile bonds. Riveting and claustrophobic, Leave the World Behind invites us to sit with our discomfort and reflect on our own rushed judgments, delivering a dazzling and dark examination of family, race, class, and what matters most when the impossible becomes possible. If you find yourself falling hard for the novel, check out Alam’s tips and tricks for writers here at Esquire.
amazon.com - 8/16
The Man Who Lived Underground, by Richard Wright
Library of America
amazon.com
$17.01
Earlier this year, Esquire investigated the forces of racism and discrimination behind the eighty-year publication delay of Richard Wright’s lost novel. The book is now retailing for 25 percent off at Amazon, meaning that there’s no better time to get up to speed. In the novel, Wright poses provocative questions: What if you could look at life from outside of life? What would you see? In this masterwork from one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, a Black man named Fred Daniels is apprehended by the police, brutally tortured, and forced to sign a confession for a violent crime he did not commit. To escape his captors, Daniels flees into the city’s underground sewers, where he transforms into someone else entirely. Beneath an unfair world, Daniels tunnels into the basements of local establishments, leading him to startling truths about morality, injustice, and what matters most when the world’s systems are stripped away. Though the novel was written in the 1940s, its visceral vision of crime and punishment continues to hold modern resonance.
amazon.com - 9/16
Detransition, Baby, by Torrey Peters
One World
amazon.com
$20.12
Amazon is offering Torrey Peters’ bestselling debut novel at almost 40 percent off (before you buy, read an exclusive excerpt here at Esquire). In this electrifying story, three lives coalesce around an unexpected pregnancy, forcing a bittersweet examination of identity, parenthood, and family. When Ames learns that his boss-turned-lover is pregnant, he confesses that he once identified as a trans woman, then hatches a plan for his lover to co-parent with his ex-girlfriend, a lonesome “trans elder” yearning to become a mother. In this compassionate, gut-punching story, Peters leans all the way into the tragicomedy of how families and identities are formed, making for a deeply searching novel that resists easy answers.
amazon.com - 10/16
No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood
Riverhead Books
amazon.com
$17.83
In February, Patricia Lockwood sat down with Esquire for a revealing profile, in which she took us behind the curtain of writing No One Is Talking About This, her debut novel. Never has the experience of being Extremely Online been more viscerally rendered than in this astonishing story of a viral celebrity who travels the world on the back of her popular tweets. It takes a family tragedy to reawaken her to the world beyond her screen, where she’s reminded that the internet can’t contain the wonders and horrors of real life. Written in a style at once lyrical and fragmentary, brimming with memes and texts, this novel locates both the profane and the profound in how we live online. No One Is Talking About This will frighten you, implicate you, and scrape your guts out, in the best way possible.
amazon.com - 11/16
Infinite Country, by Patricia Engel
Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
amazon.com
$14.95
Scoop up our March 2021 Esquire Book Club pick, which gives voice to three generations of a mixed-status Colombian family, torn apart by man-made borders. When Elena and Mauro move to the United States with their newborn, then decide to overstay their visas, the cruelty of deportation sunders their growing family, but never their bond. Gorgeously woven through with Andean myths and the bitter hardships of living undocumented, Infinite Country tells a breathtaking story of the unimaginable prices paid for a better life, while reckoning with the complex interior world of immigration, from questions of identity to the daily pain of longing for a home to which one might never return.
amazon.com - 12/16
The Hemingway Stories, by Ernest Hemingway
amazon.com
$11.63
In April, we celebrated Hemingway Week to occasion the release of Hemingway, the new documentary from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. We went deep into our archives to remember Hemingway’s days as an Esquire writer, when he chartered planes in order to meet deadlines; we also spoke with Burns and Novick about the troubled and tragic figure behind Hemingway’s mask of masculinity, revealed anew in their film. The Hemingway Stories, a keepsake collection of Papa’s best stories introduced by Tobias Wolff, is currently ringing in at 32 percent off. If you’re as hooked on Hemingway as we are, don’t hesitate to snag a copy.
amazon.com - 13/16
The Hard Crowd, by Rachel Kushner
Scribner
amazon.com
$15.99
You can’t do much better than 38 percent off The Hard Crowd, one of our Best Books of Spring 2021. Kushner’s signature literary sensibility emerges and matures in this two-decades-long collection of cultural criticism, literary journalism, and memoir, all of it proof positive of her singular way of seeing. In these nineteen forceful, blistering essays, Kushner turns her lens to everything from Jeff Koons to Denis Johnson, Palestinian refugees to Italian radical politics, classic muscle cars to San Francisco’s indie music scene. And yes, of course, there are motorcycles.
amazon.com - 14/16
Early Morning Riser, by Katherine Heiny
Knopf
amazon.com
$16.16
If you’re looking to pack your beach bag without spending too much on a beach read, spring for Early Morning Riser, an Esquire Best Book of 2021, on sale now. Early Morning Riser is a wry and wise novel about the intertwined romantic lives of the residents of a small Michigan town. New-in-town Jane falls hard for handyman Duncan, but struggles to come to terms with the growing knowledge that Duncan is the local casanova, having slept with nearly every woman in town. When a tragic car crash binds Jane forever to Duncan, his ex-wife, and his mysterious coworker, Heiny soars in her offbeat examination of small-town baggage and found families.
amazon.com - 15/16
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders
Random House
amazon.com
$14.99
Reading A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is like taking a master class with Saunders, all for the price of a discounted hardcover. Saunders has spent over two decades teaching creative writing in Syracuse University’s MFA program, where his most beloved class explores the 19th-century Russian short story in translation. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, our January 2021 Esquire Book Club pick, Saunders has distilled decades of coursework into a lively and profound crash course, exploring the mechanics of fiction through seven memorable stories by Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Gogol. In these warm, sublimely specific essays, Saunders’ astounding powers of analysis come into full view, as does his gift for linking art with life. By becoming better readers, Saunders argues, we can become better citizens of the world.
amazon.com - 16/16
Save 53% On Audible
Maybe you prefer your books piped into your ears rather than printed on a page, or you like the flexibility of being able to read while you run. If this sounds like you, sign up for Audible, Amazon’s expansive audiobook platform. With Prime Day approaching, Amazon has slashed the price of an Audible membership in half, offering Prime members 53 percent off their first four months. Sign up on the cheap and cancel anytime if it’s not for you.
Amazon
