June 2008
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"When you wake up in a dream and actually take a look around -- it’s bananas. It’s the absolute craziest goddamn thing in all of human life. Every night we beam down into an elaborate virtual world where we can pound the walls with our oven-mitt fists and sniff giant daisies and have elliptical conversations with archetypal bus drivers. From inside a dream there is nothing vague or washed out about the experience -- dreams are totally real, as real as getting off the plane in Lagos and ordering a beer from some guy at the side of the road. You are at this place -– you’re IN it! At the time it’s every bit as solid and real as waking."
by
Jason B. Jones
Historical documentation of the life of Eva Braun has been spotty and patchy. There are eight pages of an early journal, some films and photograph albums, and a few odd letters here and there. Many of the memoirs that discuss Eva Braun have the stench of Nazi mythology. Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge and Eva’s cousin Gertraud Weisker, major sources of anecdotes about Eva Braun’s life with Adolf Hitler, often have a sort of dark, fetishized romanticism to their stories, so that reading them is like watching scenes from Luchino Visconti’s The Damned.
by
Elizabeth Bachner
"I was very inspired by Graham Greene actually. Particularly by his way of depicting the tension between the physical and the emotional instincts in us. I think of my own work as being pretty traditional actually; talking about how the heart can be swayed, how love can be built up by the friction between emotion and physicality."
by
Anne Ishii
"I’m not that interested in the medical side of the narrator’s condition -- did he get hit on the head with a board? Is it dementia? I’m more concerned with the emotions behind it. One idea that comes up with theories of multiple universes is that if there are all these other versions of ourselves running around, we should somehow care about them. But if we can’t have any contact with them, what does it matter? In a way, it’s the same with our past and future selves."
by
Mark Doten
Tumbling from publishing houses this year like a storm from the sky comes post-9/11 novel after novel: Netherland by Joseph O’Neill is the newest and hottest. One of the best, though, a sweeping story of a New York irrevocably altered as much by hope and salvation as by fire and ash, was written in 1983. For 25 years, Mark Helprin’s maelstrom-between-two-covers, Winter’s Tale, somehow escaped my notice. Thanks to my friend Ginger Zarske, I fell this spring into its world, where a cloud wall rages, a white horse soars, and a love story spans centuries to bring evil to its knees.
by
Barbara J. King
"In the days before the Internet, browsing through The Book House functioned something like a collective unconscious. Folks have come in with a keyword or idea, going into browsing mode, and have found books or chapters in the middle of books that are precisely what they were either looking for. This mysterious function (William James addressed it in his 'theory of attention') has always been part of the mystique and lore of The Book House."
by
Gili Warsett
