You don't have to ingest mushrooms to feel the effects of Pinchbeck's encounters with the ultraterrestrial in this mind-trip.

Pinchbeck writes with the self-doubt, candor, and insatiable intellectual curiousity of many contemporary urbanites who sense they're on a spiritual journey, the map for which has been unfortunately misplaced among the collection of books, albums, pot flakes and grey Gap t-shirts littering their closet floors. He describes his entry into the world of psychedelics, and those first visions that ultimately sent him paddling down the Amazon to commune with shamans and plant spirits. He describes various kinds of psychedelics and their effects, from psilocybin to MDM to DTP, as well as their historical uses. He writes about the systematic repression of psychedelics by the U.S. government, and the propaganda surrounding psychedelics as one made of an intent to demean indigenous spirituality. And of course, he writes about his visions: visions had during raves, the Burning Man festivities, initiations among the Bwiti, in the Amazonian jungles, and in his New York apartment living room. Sometimes he comes back with a great spiritual vision, sometimes he just gets severe gastritis and visions of terror. Either way, it makes for fascinating reading.

I can see how this book would be very popular among other chemically courageous urban soul-seekers: read the book, take a microgram of this or that, get a bucket for the nausea, and prepare to see the universe as you never thought it could be. Commune with Buddha, maybe, who knows. It's all possible with the right music and mindframe. On the other hand, what spirituality is truly attainable for those without the proper mindframe? Pinchbeck describes this frequently in the book: without any spiritual training, how can the visions to have any meaning? If there's any aspect that's lacking in this book, it's a description of the tribal rituals surrounding the use of these revered plants. Ritual and cosmology are definitely downplayed, although Pinchbeck writes often about friends who have visions, but ultimately find them to be meaningless or even pointlessly terrifying. So if you're looking for something to illuminate your own travels with Little Smoke, this book probably won't do it, but if you're looking for a nice introductory guide to the fascinating trippy world of psychedelics, then this is the book for you.

Joshua Furst is a brilliant writer. He effortlessly draws the reader into the mind and body of his characters, allowing us to empathize, love, hate, and understand them all at once, which, as you can imagine, makes for the most bittersweet kind of story.

The Sabotage Cafe is a novel about a schizophrenic mother's hunt for her runaway teenaged daughter. Julia is outside sunbathing with her daughter one breezy day, but then she says something wrong, and Cheryl gets up, packs her backpack with the necessities and doesn't come home for a very long time. Julia has such a close relationship with her daughter that she is able to envision every cafe and squat where Cheryl hides; the gutter punks she eats, sleeps, drinks and drugs with; the parties, fights, scars and destruction she must face on her own; and all of it in reaction to the complex mix of yearning and disgust that she has for her own mother. The narrative is thick with the details of mid-nineties teenage angst: Tori Amos and Rancid, forties, meth, pea green army coats, wannabe anarchy and painted Docs. In fact, the details and plot are so complete, the emotional impetus so clear and in earnest, that after only a few chapters, it's easy to overlook the fact that Julia can't possibly know exactly every detail of her daughter's escape. Parallels between Julia's own disturbed youth and Cheryl's drunken spiral toward adulthood make themselves manifest about halfway through the story: Furst's talent enables him to tell us two stories at once. Only at the very end of the book do we begin to doubt the narrator's veracity, but even that reinforces the tragic truth of the lengths a mother will go to to find her daughter.

The jacket promises a close-up shot of the life of a biker babe, replete with bloody knuckles, drugs, bar brawls, sexual depravity, and murder. Joolz Denby delivers on all of the aforementioned, sans media glam. This is a good thing: what you get is the voice of an honest woman with a tattered past. Using a close first person, memoir-style, Denby describes the rise and fall of a British biker chick, from her early start as a schoolgirl suffering the lavender spray, floral patterns, and emotional manipulation of her waspish mother and sister, through the self-absorption of hippiedom, to the sense of family, albeit crudely, gained through hanging out with biker clubs in late 60's England. Billie Morgan's toughness comes from her straight-forward nature and quick tongue, not to mention the black sheep persona her long-gone father bestowed upon her. She suspects she's a survivor, but she hasn't quite had a chance to prove it. As soon as she dons the leathers, though, Billie gets noticed. The gang leadership likes her savvy ways, but in the testosterone-fueled biker lifestyle, babes are accessories. Billie is urged to stand by her man so he can be fully initiated into the gang. It's apparent to the club membership that Billie's man, though a good enough soldier, doesn't have what it takes to truly weather the storms. So Billie steps up, fueled by love: love for her honey, love for the gang, love for the black sheep inside, as well as a little bit of affection for an occasional snort of this or that snuck off a hand mirror. That's where the trouble starts. There's a lot of good soldiers who hang around the edges of the gang, wanting an in, desperate for tail or drugs or a place to belong and bum tools, smokes, and pints. But what happens when the most brutal chauvinistic speedfreak poser runs up against self-sufficient lady Morgan? Well...let's just say some farmer's going to plow up a very unpleasant-smelling turnip someday...

So there's a taste of the backstory. The real pull of this sad tale, though, comes from Billie's consideration of past mistakes in relation to her current troubles. She's a business owner and a worried godmother, a guardian angel for an old friend with a similarly tattered past as well as a severe heroin addiction: a bit of the old life still clinging to the boot soles. She lives alone. She works with a bubbly friend who regularly gets manicures. And then an upstart journalist comes knocking, asking for an interview regarding a missing acquaintance of Billie's, someone from way back when Billie's desire for speed was enough to slog her and her honey through the countryside to seek out a supplier, a supplier who was never seen again.

Billie, usually cool as a cucumber, is shaken.

Joolz Denby's gift for characterization shows in this novel about a woman digging through the skeletons in the closet. The effects of pop culture phenomena emerge in the language of the people: Billie's biker pals, her hip-hopified godson, her drug-fueled friend Jasmine, and her sassy business partner Lexie. The voices and emotions of lives pushed too close to the edge are what this story is about. Denby uses Billie Morgan to explore the dark side of courage, the truth of human weakness, selfishness, and suffering, and out of that, maybe shows us a little something about letting go of the past, letting go before it drags us deep down into the grave.

Being Mexican-American, three major themes in this graphic novel really resonated with me: 1.) no matter what Americans may think, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans are from two different cultures; 2.) sometimes it's best to curse in Spanish; and 3.) look out for crunchies who romanticize Mexico. They're probably running from something, and hoping beyond all hope that it can be found south of the border. This GN has all the elements of a fine graphic novel: show don't tell, illuminating line drawings, an expressive main character, and FOCUS. Jessica Abel writes about Mexico City through the eyes of her main character rather than through the ink pen of the artist. What we the readers get is a close first-person view of D.F. from the perspective of an American boho expatriate who desperately wants to discover her roots--what she believes will give her strength--by backpacking, couch-surfing, smoking pot, and falling in love in the most romantic and tawdry vecindades of Mexico City. Can you guess what happens next?

Ah, heartbreak of the most dramatic kind, i.e. the kind involving drug-runners, the media, kidnapping, murder, mysoginy, hypocrisy, and a child getting drunk drinking beer on the former lake Tlatelolco. If you read this book get ready for a serious culture clash: Americans face up to your capitalist nature and Mexicans get ready for some brutally honest back alley violence. And listen close: I'm not saying that is a book that exposes seedy truths about Mexican and American culture, but I am saying that it's the naive souls in our societies who suffer the worst crimes, regardless of race, culture, socio-economic status. Jessica Abel does a great job of depicting the worm in the bottom of the tequila bottle and the aftermath...oh, the aftermath.

The Dispossessed is a sci-fi classic, winning Hugo and Nebula awards in the mid-seventies, and continually being reprinted in new editions with increasingly elucidating cover art. I won't go into a long description of why this book is so great--taut and clear writing style, strong characterization, lyrical passages describing complex inner monologues and difficult philosophical/political/physics concepts that seem to defy the passage of time--rather I will comment on the way the themes of this novel seem to stretch and grow in my brain.

LeGuin posits a sociopolitical dance between two opposing planets: wealthy, capitalist and glamorous Urras; and arid, anarchistic Annares. Shevek, a brilliant Annaresti physicist on the verge of uncovering a fundamental truth about time and space is consistenly quashed by his countrymen who, though attesting innate individual freedom, have become stuck in a passive-aggressive determination to retain the status quo. Frustrated by his inability to test and pursue his theory, he arranges to travel to Urras in the hopes of sharing his work with Urrasti physicists.

LeGuin explores gender roles (the oppressed vs. equality), division of labor, freedom as something earned or inherently owned, and of course, anarchism vs. centralized government while we follow Shevek through uncomfortable social situations and conversations thick with hidden meaning. The arid deserts of Annares contrast with the lush and bejeweled Urrasti lifestyles. People from Annares speak honestly; Urrastis deceive. The interrelationships of the characters expand in my mind like landscapes scrolling across the window of a train.

I see me in and the people I know in both troubled civilizations: the aristocrats and the vegetable-growers, the trust fund babies and the self-made. LeGuin never preaches, and her writing doesn't suggest a personal bias. At the end, when I began to wonder more and more where our current civilization might fit in, LeGuin introduces an Earthly ambassador. I won't write more. Read the book and see if you agree with the human.

If you're a horror fan that has an appreciation for the Chinese Box approach to story-telling, or maybe just the patience and good eye sight to handle pages and pages of footnotes, twisting/turning endnotes and red on white fonts, then you may appreciate this helluva first novel by the brilliant Mark Danielewski.

Hook: a failed tattoo artist with a mentally unbalanced mother helps clean out a defunct old man's apartment and discovers a trunk containing notes for the beginning of an anthropological critique about a documentary of a house that eats its inhabitants. Whew. That was a long and winding sentence, and so is the plot AND textual layout in this book that is literally designed to eat your brain while the neurons are still firing.

Once I realized what I was getting into, I shut off my phone, locked the tv in the closet, and ate take-out for the entire two weeks it took me to read every word in this book in the order it was meant to be read. When I finished it, I moped around for months looking for ANYTHING as creative and engaging. I also tried to talking to my friends and family about it, and discovered this: a few people loved it, out of those few, two had nightmares for weeks and were creeped out by the shadows in their own bedrooms, and the many who didn't like it later admitted to not exactly reading the whole thing because it was too complicated. In other words, this is no night-table reading.

If you read this book, and love it as much as I do, here's two bits of advice: 1.) give yourself time and space to read it right, and 2.) once you put it back on the shelf or lend it out or trade it or whatever you do with the read and ravished, try graphic novels for a while, or art, or learning a new language or instrument because here's the thing: in comparison, typical linear fiction reads like Dick and Jane.

I need to write a letter to Mr. Urrea to thank him for writing this important novel. Being of Yaqui descent, I grew up hearing about Santa Teresa, and when I was in college and reading about the Mexican genocide of the Yaqui people in Sonora, I became familiar with mythology around Teresa. One of my life goals is to write about that bloody history and the resultant pathos still prevalent in the Yaqui communities of Arizona (los veinte y siete), but it seems like such an immense task.

It took Luis Alberto Urrea twenty years of research before he set pen to paper, but what a graceful result. The story begins during Santa Teresa's impoverished childhood, in which she is regularly harrassed and beaten by her aunt. The determined child lives, however, and falls into the care of the pueblo curandera La Huila, who teaches her how to heal, listen, and dream.

I'm satisfied to read how Mr. Urrea describes Yoeme teleology: death is the beginning of true life, and dreams are the passage from this world to the next. Flowers signify blessedness, and a person's relationship with their land is what saves them. I strongly suggest that people of Mexican American, Mexican, Yaqui, Tarahumara, Opata, Seri, Pima, and Apache descent read this novel.

Mr. Urrea has preserved an important piece of history that is not known by most Americans, and has, in the past, been intentionally interred by the Mexican government.

I don't think I'm an obtuse reader. Maybe I am. I don't know. I zipped through House of Leaves without leaving a single subnote, endnote, footnote, or secret letter unread. I praised that title to my friends and experienced Danielewski withdrawal once I was done, finding nothing on the library shelves or in bookstores that filled my brain quite so well.

Imagine how good it felt to get my hands on this latest work, only to be left confused, frustrated, and generally dim-witted. I look forward to someone out there correcting my misconceptions and lack of understanding.

The book is meant to be read from cover to cover, twice, eight pages at a time, so that as a reader, you can get a sense of a rollicking thematically-repetitive relationship told from the perspective of both yellow-eyed Hailey and green-eyed Sam. The tale is told in verse, which is fun to read out loud, but burning rubber on my brain stem til there wasn't enough left for me to figure out exactly what the list of historical events on the left side of each page had to do with the tale told between the lines.

It's cool that Danielewski did his research: the verse shifts from era to era: sometimes Hailey and Sam are living out their love in Harlem and sometimes they're jitterbugging and sometimes they're rolling with California motorcycle gangs. Hey, I'm a big fan of time travel and super-dimensional interplanar visitation but I still walked out of this book feeling like I got pounded in the head with a tale I've heard once before: love goes round and round and the violence of it is what's ripping this world to pieces and opening up whole new ones.

Maybe I'm being too critical. I'll give it a try in ten years or so, or maybe twenty, when I'm more well-read and more mature and more patient. Danielewski, you're brilliant. Write me something new. I'm waiting! You're just moving too fast for this pea brain.