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This book is hilarious, unsettling and prescient all at once; when I started reading it, it felt like the story was taking place a few years from now. By the time I had finished, it felt more like the future it described was mere months away. Vanessa Veselka is a disturbingly talented seer as well as a writer of astonishing gifts.

This book will dazzle you with its constantly shifting perspectives, styles and left turns. Great fun. AND the author appears at Wordstock this October, so you'll able to find out for yourself what sort of mind can create such a crazy quilt of storytelling.

This is a fascinating study that seems likely to really satisfy no one. People hoping to be reassured that consciousness transcends the body will be disappointed; most of Nelson's findings suggest that spiritual experiences can be explained away by chemical processes and out-of-phase REM states. And hardcore materialists will be annoyed to find that Nelson is reluctant to completely dismiss spiritual experiences as mere matters of biological functions. For me the book's most suggestive exploration is its examination of out-of-body experiences and lucid dreaming, two different activities that the author treats as identical. His careful dissection of the latter has to do with conscious manipulation of the sleep process, and he stresses several times that human beings can learn to gain control of it. It would have been gratifying if he had followed that study to its logical conclusion -- namely, that if we accept that spiritual experiences are not magic, isn't it to be expected that there would be physical indices of those experiences? Haven't shamans and others used their bodies in analogous ways since time out of mind? But Nelson doesn't tip his hand. Either he hesitates to alienate half of his potential readership, or he's a stealth writer for one side or the other. In any case, for me this was an absorbing and informative read.

You will never forget some of the people you meet in this outstanding collection of short stories. Maile Meloy presents a rogue's gallery of conflicted people who find themselves at various forms of crossroads, and must decide between equally disturbing choices (often including the option of taking no action at all). I will return to many of these stories again and again.

The book’s subtitle says it all: “How to Find Funds and Write Foolproof Proposals for the Visual, Literary, and Performing Arts.” The how-to part of the equation is here in abundance, but what I appreciate about this volume is the moral support its author offers. Gigi’s writing is casual yet no-nonsense; she speaks from her own experience, as one from the trenches, so she sounds like a pal, like a peer — rather than Moses handing down commandments from on high. The Artist’s Guide already has a place on my reference shelf, within arm’s reach of my desk. I’ll be turning to it many, many times in the months to come.

This lush, luxuriant recasting of the Hamlet story gives us Shakespeare's doomed Dane as seen through the eyes of Horatio, the beloved BFF seen only briefly in the famous play. Devotees of the original tragedy will delight in how cleverly the author sneaks line after famous line into her characters' thoughts and exchanges, as well as how the Bard's own narrative is amplified by the back story this book provides. But you don't have to know the play well to appreciate this lightly erotic love story and its many rhapsodies; it has its own pleasures, in abundance.

Victor Lodato is well known to theatergoers for his strikingly original plays (The Bread of Winter and 3F, 4F, to name just a couple). Mathilda Savitch is his first novel. The book is written entirely in the voice of its eponymous heroine -- a voice that surprised me on nearly every page. It’s Mathilda’s distinct perspective, paired with her zealot’s determination to affect her world, that makes her such a vivid 13-year-old. Here’s how she presents herself to us in the book’s first paragraph: "I want to be awful. I want to do awful things and why not? Dull is dull is dull is my life. Like now, it’s night, not yet time for bed but too late to be outside, and the two of them reading reading reading with their eyes moving like the lights inside a copy machine. When I was helping put the dishes in the washer tonight, I broke a plate. I said sorry Ma it slipped. But it didn’t slip, that’s how I am sometimes, and I want to be worse." Not quite a coming of age story, this book examines a turning point in the life of a precocious virago whom circumstances have caused to grow up a little too quickly. Now on the verge of a premature adulthood, Mathilda is often laugh-out-loud funny, but just as often she’s maddening, disturbing, or unexpectedly poignant. She lurches between a brat’s chatty volubility and the perspicacity of a world-weary adult – the psychic equivalent of a boy’s voice cracking. Some readers may be distracted by this, but to me it was the author’s very point in delineating someone of this age and with these problems. She’s in a liminal space: too schooled in adult matters to be a kid, too young to bear adult disappointments. In short, I loved this book!