This month for our October Lucky Stars, we present men, men like any other men, only moreso, to paraphrase a fictional man like Rick Blaine. Each of these e-books — just $1.99 apiece throughout the month — introduces us to a man figuring out who he is, what his character is in some unusual circumstances. Plus three of the books include free previews of brand new novels by their authors!

An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England by Brock Clarke: A lot of remarkable things have happened in the life of Sam Pulsifer, the hapless hero of this incendiary novel, beginning with the ten years he spent in prison for accidentally burning down Emily Dickinson’s house and unwittingly killing two people. emerging at age twenty-eight, he creates a new life and identity as a husband and father. But when the homes of other famous New England writers suddenly go up in smoke, he must prove his innocence by uncovering the identity of this literary-minded arsonist.

In the league of such contemporary classics as A Confederacy of Dunces and The World According to Garp, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England is an utterly original story about truth and honesty, life and the imagination.

You can buy the An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England e-book for $1.99 throughout October.  This e-book includes a free preview of Clarke’s novel The Happiest People on Earth.

Exley by Brock Clarke: For young Miller Le Ray, life has become a search. A search for his dad, who may or may not have joined the army and gone to Iraq. A search for a notorious (and, unfortunately, deceased) writer, Frederick Exley, author of the “fictional memoir” A Fan’s Notes, who may hold the key to bringing Miller’s father back. But most of all, his is a search for truth. As Miller says, “Sometimes you have to tell the truth about some of the stuff you’ve done so that people will believe you when you tell them the truth about other stuff you haven’t done.”

In Exley as in his previous bestselling novel, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, Brock Clarke takes his reader into a world that is both familiar and disorienting, thought-provoking and thoroughly entertaining. Told by Miller and Dr. Pahnee, both unreliable narrators, it becomes an exploration of the difference between what we believe to be real and what is in fact real.

You can buy the Exley e-book for $1.99 throughout October. This e-book includes a free preview of Clarke’s novel The Happiest People on Earth.

Life Among Giants by Bill Roorbach: This funny, exuberant novel captures the reader with the grand sweep of seven-foot-tall David “Lizard” Hochmeyer’s larger-than-life quest to unravel the mystery surrounding his parents’ deaths. It’s a journey laden with pro football stars, a master chef and his beautiful transvestite lover, a world-famous ballerina and her English rocker husband, and a sister who’s as brilliant as she is unstable. A wildly entertaining, plot-twisting novel of murder, seduction, and revenge—rich in incident, expansive in character, and lavish in setting—Life Among Giants is an exhilarating adventure.

Editors’ pick for Amazon’s Best of 2012, Shelf Awareness Top Ten Best Fiction of 2012, Columbus Dispatch’s Top Books of 2012.

You can buy the Life Among Giants e-book for $1.99 throughout October. This e-book includes a free preview of Clarke’s novel The Remedy for Love.

The Third Son by Julie Wu: In the middle of a terrifying air raid in Japanese-occupied Taiwan, Saburo, the least-favored son of a Taiwanese politician, runs through a forest for cover. It’s there he stumbles on Yoshiko, whose descriptions of her loving family are to Saburo like a glimpse of paradise. Meeting her is a moment he will remember forever, and for years he will try to find her again. When he finally does, she is by the side of his oldest brother and greatest rival.

In Saburo, author Julie Wu has created an extraordinary character, determined to fight for everything he needs and wants, from food to education to his first love. The Third Son is a sparkling and moving story about a young boy with his head in the clouds who, against all odds, finds himself on the frontier of America’s space program.

You can buy the The Third Son e-book for $1.99 throughout October.

The Day My Brain Exploded by Ashok Rajamani: After a full-throttle brain bleed at the age of twenty-five, Ashok Rajamani, a first-generation Indian American, had to relearn everything: how to eat, how to walk and to speak, even things as basic as his sexual orientation.

With humor and insight, he describes the events of that day (his brain exploded just before his brother’s wedding!), as well as the long, difficult recovery period. In the process, he introduces readers to his family—his principal support group, as well as a constant source of frustration and amazement. Irreverent, coruscating, angry, at times shocking, but always revelatory, his memoir takes the reader into unfamiliar territory, much like the experience Alice had when she fell down the rabbit hole. That he lived to tell the story is miraculous; that he tells it with such aplomb is simply remarkable.

More than a decade later he has finally reestablished a productive artistic life for himself, still dealing with the effects of his injury—life-long half-blindness and epilepsy— but forging ahead as a survivor dedicated to helping others who have suffered a similar catastrophe.

You can buy the The Day My Brain Exploded e-book for $1.99 throughout October.

Joe by Larry Brown: Now a movie starring Nicholas Cage, Joe tells the story of Joe Ransom, nearing fifty, who lives hard and likes danger. A drinker, a gambler, a fighter, he’s using up what little luck he has left. He drives his pickup too fast, draws his gun too quick. By day he’s foreman of a crew of blacks who work in the north Mississippi woods poisoning trees for a lumber company. By night, he visits the whorehouses and gambling dens hidden in the woods back up off the road.

Gary Jones estimates his own age to be about fifteen. Born luckless, he lives off discards and garbage. His father, an itinerant farmworker, is as evil as men come. His mother is insane from ancient grief. Their children have known only an endless road, daily hunger, and their parents’ bestiality. It’s up to the boy to provide, so he’s looking for work that pays—and a truck to get it.

When their paths cross, Joe Ransom offers Gary Jones a chance just as his own chances have dwindled to almost nothing.

He has earned critical acclaim for his brilliant antiwar novel, Dirty Work, and for his short stories about men who ride the back roads in pickup trucks, their Igloo coolers close at hand, their hunting dogs in back. The failed and forgotten, the boozers, brawlers, wife-beaters, the no-counts. That he understands and dramatizes their redemption is the basis of his power as a writer. Now, in Joe, Brown unleashes the full power of his talent and creates this story of the bond between one such man riding those roads and a boy who walks them.

You can buy the Joe e-book for $1.99 throughout October.