My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.

Radio - and perhaps airplanes, and then of course, the atom bomb - was the preeminent technology of the first half of the 20th century. It was how the Third Reich controlled its citizens, spread lies, and disseminated fear.

Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It's wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new all over again.

Things hardly ever work on the first try. We'll make another, a better one.