Tag Archives: agent orange

Reading E-Books Without an E-Reader

Did you know you can read books published via Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (AKDP) without having a Kindle? Not a lot of people know it, but it’s super easy.

CLICK HERE for a full list, with links, of free Kindle reading apps. It features a huge variety of devices, including smartphones, other e-readers, laptops/PCs, tablets, and more.

Once you do that, you can read my published works for super cheap; my black humor anti-Monsanto political revenge thriller Orange Rain is just $2.99 (also available in paperback). Redwood Falls, an epic coming-of-age environmental thriller brimming with over 400 pages of thrilling literary fiction, is only $1.99. Finally, Kiss Me Like You Mean It–a poignant, funny, entertaining, and heartbreaking narrative nonfiction look at some of my experiences doing Hurricane Katrina relief work in New Orleans, featuring about a dozen photographs I took there–is a mere $0.99!

Happy reading!

Win a FREE Copy of My Novel Orange Rain!

I’m doing a Goodreads giveaway starting tonight, Friday, at midnight–enter to win one of 10 free signed, personalized copies by clicking Enter Giveaway below!

“The eco-warriors next door embark on a lightning round of vigilante justice. Orange Rain is what happens when the Monkey Wrench Gang goes Death Wish and moves from the scrubland to the streets. Literature that incites.”
Peter Young, former political prisoner & animal liberator

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Orange Rain by Jan Smitowicz

Orange Rain

by Jan Smitowicz

Giveaway ends October 19, 2015.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/widget/154077

New Author Website + $0.99 Kindle Book Sale

Hey, I finally got a decent-looking website up! Check it out 🙂

www.JanSmitowicz.com

thumbsup jesus

Also, the Kindle edition of my darkly funny anti-Monsanto political revenge thriller Orange Rain is temporarily on sale for just $0.99! It currently has *28* five-star reviews, check it out! You don’t even need a Kindle to read, you can download the Kindle app and read on your computer or smartphone 🙂

That authorial first-book glee.

That authorial first-book glee.

*FREE PROMO!* My Revenge Novel “Orange Rain”, Now Revised and Including Bonus Materials!

Orange Rain has been revamped: now professionally edited, with a new cover and bonus materials at the end!

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To celebrate this, I’m offering the book for FREE DOWNLOAD starting tomorrow, Tuesday, April 1 and ending Saturday, April 5, 2014!! After that, it will be available for the 50% reduced price of $2.99 for another five days!
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Click here to download ORANGE RAIN from Amazon.

 

cover

Max Wright is homicidally enraged with people who wrecked his life—people he has never met or even seen. The Vietnam War left him poisoned and cancer-ridden from the spraying of Agent Orange, legless, and addicted to heroin, forced to sell drugs to support his habit and suppress his pain. Now he’s kicked heroin, and burns for revenge on the loathsome corporation that manufactured Agent Orange.

With his Vietnamese ex-prostitute girlfriend Mai Linh, Max hitchhikes across mid-1980s America. Destination: Florida, where a university medical clinic is performing cutting-edge prosthetic leg implants. Only when he is able-bodied, Max reasons, can he attempt an attack on the corporation that ravaged his body, and decimated Mai Linh’s life. Hot on Max and Mai’s trail is Victor Wattana, the “Oriental Massage Parlor” owner whose money they stole and penis they snapped in half following a rape attempt.

From the illicit pharmaceutical underworld of San Francisco’s Tenderloin to the cocaine-dusted film set of amputee porn in booming Las Vegas, from the urban-industrial hideout of militant black revolutionaries to a botched backyard lynching by Texas frat boys, Orange Rain hurtles from one stunning scene to the next. It sways between the hilarious and the hideous, exploring myriad dark places in America where the two intersect. It is an ode to humans’ ability to endure in the face of horrific cruelty and suffering. A celebration of feminine strength and spirit.

 

NOTE: If you don’t have a Kindle, you can get the free Kindle app and read it on your phone or computer!

A Huey helicopter unleashing the “orange rain” on Vietnam.

WHAT READERS ARE SAYING ABOUT ORANGE RAIN:

Jan Smitowicz is the Hunter S. Thompson for a new generation, and ‘Orange Rain’ is every inch the mind-bending ride you would expect from such an author. I guarantee you’ve never come across a novel like this before. The pace is fast and the the language is both inventive and obscene . . . If you long for a world where despicable behavior has immediate and devastating consequences, Mr. Smitowicz has your order up.”
-A.F.

“I’m always up for a plot in which the little guy fights back against the big guy. And you can’t get bigger than Monsanto. Go, Max!…Rapists getting beaten. Poisoners getting poisoned. Dogs getting liberated. That kind of justice is always so cathartic. I don’t read enough of it.”  -J.C.

Orange Rain is fast-paced and exciting . . . a tale of pure beauty.”
-M.N.

“You must read this, my peeps. You must relish the dark humor, the excitement, predicaments, the shredding of evil entities, the endings that make the world go ’round. I don’t care how the academics describe this book – I’m doing it my way: you won’t be disappointed. In fact, you’ll be singing from rooftops. Oh, yes you will!”
-A.L.

A rollicking adventure in which a search for legs and revenge leads to a cross-country trip jam-packed with thrills, chills, and seat-of-the-pants escapes…Exhilarating, thought-provoking, and relevant, Orange Rain is worth your time!”
-J.

“I loved this book! I literally couldn’t put it down. It explores some really serious topics (veterans and PTSD, chemicals and the environment, fat corporate America) in a fairly dark but wildly funny twisted way that engaged me from the first page.”
-R.S.

The Horrorshow of Modern Life: An ORANGE RAIN Excerpt

agent orange spraying

This is a one-page section from my e-published revenge novel Orange Rain; click on the title to learn more about it! I’m working with a professional editor on it–we’re almost finished, and hopefully I’ll have a print edition available soon, stay tuned!

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Max considers saying something to Andre about taking Valium—that he needs to be careful not to get hooked. But Max can hardly blame the kid! He’s had a hard fucking run. Deserves a little relief. Max pops his fair share of benzos; who’s he to talk? He keeps wondering how the human psyche can take so much trauma, so much shit, and stay intact. Stay functional. It’s like wailing on an engine with a sledgehammer: eventually the damn car has to break down! And with life in mid-1980s America, this sledgehammer is getting bigger, heavier, the vitriolic blows more frequent and fiercer all the time. This grotesque horrorshow of modern life.

How are people managing the pain? We know how Max did it. Soon after he first stared into the jagged-toothed, rapid-dog-maw of this increasingly horrendous world, during Vietnam, he dashed for morphine and reveled in its sweet, soft comfort. Numbed himself ravenously.

Hey, you know, that’s what most people do in this culture. Whether it’s junk or blow or speed or pills, or the most popular of all, alcohol, or whether it’s a little less obvious—like television, sports, pop culture, silly gossip and human drama, the mindless drivel of newsstand paperbacks—we all have our drugs, our agents of analgesia.

Max thinks of something he once heard, probably from a tweaker (those people are veritable encyclopedias of obscure information and spare gadgets). Apparently, the eminent jazz saxophonist John Coltrane ate so much candy that his teeth became cavity-ridden and unbearably sore. He started doing heroin to numb the throbbing pain, and ended up hooked on it for years. That’s nearly the perfect symbol for Max’s decade-plus Monsanto dilemma, and the dominant culture as a whole. Treating symptoms instead of attacking or eliminating the root of the problem. Shirking responsibility. From there, we displace the blame and hate onto ourselves instead of hurling them like a heavy rock through a glass window at those who really deserve it—at the pyramid of power, as Lance would say.