If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, Italo CalvinoCalvino's masterpiece opens with a scene that's reassuringly commonplace: apparently. Indeed, it's taking place now. A reader goes into a bookshop to buy a book: not any book, but the latest Calvino, the book you are holding in your hands. Or is it? Are you the reader? Is this the book? Beware. All assumptions are dangerous on this most bewitching switch back ride to the heart of storytelling.

In the conflict that follows

Faces at a distance / Hsiuwen Liu

The expression

or music—never go away

grew up with Genghis Khan's army

Explains how the human memory works

Certain they’re fated to find each other again

Alex Davenport

works late each night

Sigurd’s friends call from the cabin asking where he is — according to them

he takes you inside the stone walls to see first-hand what it was really like to be incarcerated there

and a friendlier-than-ever voice