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Like a cross between a Last Exit to Brooklyn (set in Texas) and Jim Thompson's This World Then the Fireworks.

These stories are incredible.

"Blindness and deafness and dumbness, all sweet, had attended my fall through the regions beyond."

como el Luke Skywalker, cabron

"Okay you guys, ya been in my pockets, we're going downtown."

"Until the age of 22 I thought that children were born through the navel."

Amalgamation of sci-fi car club disasters, Japanese monster-noir, cowpokey non sequiturs and Dadaist comics. Like a bowl of tentacle soup: unforgettable but not entirely satisfying.

The evening you and I heard the Border Patrol found the bodies of a young man and woman lying down locked in an eternal embrace near an ocotillo plant they used for shelter during a blistering August day in a remote corner of the Imperial Valley desert, no water, shoes chewed up by the journey north, clothes tattered, we sat in silence at our dinner table and questioned everything we had already thanked our god for.

"Never a louder silence than when you stand in a room where someone lived for many years alone." Gorgeous syntax.

"Bullshit is okay if everybody agrees to believe it."

Two of the first three stories -- "Madmen" and "Godzilla Versus The Smog Monster" -- are extraordinary.

Strange.

Reading Bleeding Edge is like cruising the Internet. There's a thread, however chaotic and faint, but it's not the point.

Salinger's son was in Revenge of the Nerds

Salinger's son was in Revenge of the Nerds

Thoroughly engrossing though I didn't care for the David Shields fan fic crit.

"Chances are you will not see a single ghost in your lifetime."

Seems to be an investigation of how we create meaning out of language, a pursuit which leads like an arrow striking its target to the self.

A deeply weird book that operates on several levels from the symbolic to the surreal. It's about a hunter who makes a home for himself and his new wife in the woods, and sets in motion a string of events, each more calamitous than the last. Bell's prose has the force of myth, which makes things like character motivation difficult to parse. I suppose that's the point: our man is a cypher to himself.

"The older I became, the harder it would be to get what I wanted, but that was probably true of everyone with everything."

"This boy went with a girlfriend of mine. But sometimes that's just tough shit."

"The coffee was wonderful and Sergio told his hostess so. Azucena Esquivel Plata laughed (actually, she just bared her teeth and let out a sound bearing some resemblance to laughter, a sound like the croak of a night bird) and said he wouldn't know what good was until he tried her tequila."