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Your Dark Meaning, Mouse is the ultimate field guide to the most bewildering and elusive topic in all literature: Dark Meaning, a subject that hitherto has only been accessible after deep study and courageous initiation to the most resourceful and sagacious of scholars, withdrawn, lab-coated persons who occasionally may be found stumbling about in forests, taking cryptic notes in their squared-paper moleskins from closely attended birdsong and astronomical observations. Now this indispensable collection of essays, stories, poems and scripts blasts the subject into public consciousness and beyond.

"Lapo is a marine biologist who wakes up one day in a hospital bed after an accident that caused him amnesia. When distant memories slowly resurface and the weight of modern life becomes apparent, he realizes that having an empty head was not so bad. Like a present-day Oblomov, Lapo clings to his hospital routine to avoid the outside world, fending off the attacks of family and friends who continuously pester him. As the days go by, the pressure for Lapo to go back to his normal life keeps mounting. Will he ever leave the hospital or will he settle there for good? Lost pieces of his history may provide the answer. Interspersed with intimate thoughts and daydreams about the lives of the fish he used to study, Lapo's epic struggle is filled with irony and depth in equal measure. Nostalgic and provocative, Reset is an existentialist journey through the inner world of a man who has lost the thread of life and finds it again in nature and his past."--Amazon.

"Drawn both from previously unanthologized published work and from the author's personal horde of typescripts from the 1960s to the 1980s, this collection of stories centers around philosophical themes: the awareness of existence and experience, of reality and truth, and the relativity of time and place"--

Fiction. Everyone is constantly admonishing our narrator to keep quiet: You're full of bull hockey, college boy...Shut up and drink your beer. Or, 'Shut up, ' Michelle replied. 'Shut up, ' Michelle repeated. Or, Don't look up. At least don't shout anything when you do. She's here, on the balcony. Or, 'Shit.' Sarah spit this out like a too-hot cinnamon ball, pulled me off the dental chair, and led me to the closet with the skeleton, shushing me with her fingers. Or, Hush, be still. Tacete, tacete. Everyone admonishes him, when all he wants to do is shout the wonders, the horrors, the terrors that he and his older adoptive brother Galen face as one spiritual incursion after another manifests in their lives, moving from trickster poltergeists to forlornly wandering ghosts to intent fetches to avenging revenants. Perhaps, instead of admonishing him, everyone would do better to heed his early, youthful deliberation: I never heard his voice again after that night. If we humans could always recognize the last words we were ever to hear from each person we knew or even met, our lives would perch as fragile indeed, gathering tragedy every listening moment to lean over a dark cellar, of dark farewell

Poetry. In this prodigious outpouring of short pieces, Marvin Cohen looks into every corner of human affairs, even the darkest - death, reproduction, evolution, friendship, grief, the vagaries of adaptation and survival - with a joyful spark that never goes out.

Fiction. After a nefarious yet revered mayor bans horse-drawn carriages in his city, a reclusive horse-and-buggy driver loses his job, his lover, and his unborn child, as the desolate farm he has lived on his whole life deteriorates around him along with his sanity. But this lone wolf vows revenge. With language lean and lyrical, and humor dark and grotesque, HORSEBUGGY is not only a haunting portrait of what happens when man's capacity for intimacy and acceptance is undermined by his more violent and sadistic impulses, but also a tragic love story and a penetrating study of how we destroy ourselves as much with our moralism and self-righteousness as with our vice and self-indulgence.

Fiction. Art. Illustrated by Royce M. Becker. Charles Holdefer, author of DICK CHENEY IN SHORTS, The Contractor, and Back in the Game, has here uncovered, with abundant aplomb and loads of literary-archaeological legerdemain, a crucial long-lost manuscript by legendary magician Blast. For years Blast has been an ongoing source of wonder on five continents, for crowned heads, international celebrities and ordinary folk alike. His record for the world's longest card trick still stands. Now this famous manipulator offers you a choice selection of his most delightful magic tricks, all carefully explained and simplified with the beginner in mind. You need not practice for hours. This is magic even you can do, laid out in an easy-to-carry pocket edition for convenient reference no matter where you find yourself, and sumptuously illustrated in full color by Royce M. Becker.

Fiction. THIN RISING VAPORS by Seth Rogoff (author of FIRST, THE RAVEN: A PREFACE) is a richly psychological novel about enduring yet fragile friendship and the allure of nature and faith. Ezra Stern hasn't seen his best friend from childhood and college in the six years since Abel suddenly quit a successful career in New York to live alone in a cabin in the Maine woods. In late November, Ezra receives a letter from an estate lawyer telling him that Abel has died and that he has inherited the deceased's property in the lakeside town of Casco. That evening, as the first blizzard of the year approaches, Ezra leaves the city for Abel's house. Over the next seven days, Ezra searches to understand his friend's reclusive life and mysterious death by poring compulsively over Abel's voluminous posthumous papers, typed on an old Remington manual. As Ezra becomes increasingly immersed in Abel's writings, the coherence of the story of Abel's life builds and disintegrates in successive swells. Ezra discovers in the center of what had been familiar something irremediably alien, and in the heart of that total otherness--the unbearably intimate.