Darkness Promotes Speech.

At One Magical Instant In Your Early Childhood, The Page Of A Book—that String Of Confused, Alien Ciphers—shivered Into Meaning. Words Spoke To You, Gave Up Their Secrets; At That Moment, Whole Universes Opened. You Became, Irrevocably, A Reader.

We Seem To Live A Culture That Doesn't Want Blemishes. The Vision Of Most Beautiful Models... Airbrushed In Order To Be Seen As Perfect, Infects Our Notion Of How Literature Should Be Written.

To Say That An Author Is A Reader Or A Reader An Author, To See A Book As A Human Being Or A Human Being A Book, To Describe The World As Text Or A Text As The World, Are Ways Of Naming The Readers Craft.

Unicorns, Dragons, Witches May Be Creatures Conjured Up In Dreams, But On The Page Their Needs, Joys, Anguishes, And Redemptions Should Be Just As True As Those Of Madame Bovary Or Martin Chuzzlewit.

Old Books That We Have Known But Not Possessed Cross Our Path And Invite Themselves Over. New Books Try To Seduce Us Daily With Tempting Titles And Tantalizing Covers.