Discoveries

The Farther Shore

A Novel

Matthew Eck

Milkweed Editions: 178 pp., $22

SIX soldiers are left behind enemy lines in a hostile city, the last battleground in a bloody war. Like players in a chess game, they must negotiate with tribesmen and warlords to rejoin their unit. It is a desolate landscape. The soldiers shoot several children in the darkness. In their dehydration, exhaustion and confusion, they kill and kill and kill.

Every horrifying aspect of war is captured in Matthew Eck's spare prose. When the narrator finally reaches a U.S. Army hospital on the city's outskirts, his dearest wish is to forget the whole experience: "I thought about college ahead of me. I wouldn't tell anyone I'd been in the Army. And if they asked why I was a little older, I'd tell them I'd lived abroad, maybe in Prague. I'd tell them the world was a beautiful place."

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The History of Last Night's Dream

Discovering the Hidden Path to the Soul

Rodger Kamenetz

HarperOne: 272 pp., $24.95

IT'S palate-cleansing for readers: Rodger Kamenetz, author of "The Jew in the Lotus" and "Stalking Elijah," writes in this fascinating book that words, too many words, stand between us and our dreams. We must learn to think in images, the language of dreams. And if we overcome our obsession with interpreting dreams, we can access the truths they offer. ("The usual emphasis on interpretation overshadows the possibility of direct revelation.") But first we must accept what's revealed: "[O]ur dreams have a difficult job precisely because they come to remind us not only of what we have forgotten, but of what we have forgotten we have forgotten." Kamenetz takes us through the history of our attempts to understand our dreams, relying a great deal on purely Jewish texts, like the Zohar, but also on Genesis, the Gnostic Gospels and many others. His teachers -- among them an 87-year-old Algerian mystic called Colette and a postman/astrologer/dream-therapist named Marc Bregman -- show him ways to bring dreams to the surface, such as Freud's method of free association. Bregman teaches him how to focus on images in the dreamscape and feelings around the dream's events. A dream's ability to reveal the opposition in your life -- the person, pattern or thing that keeps you from being happy -- is, Kamenetz writes, "a strange miracle."

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The Entire Predicament

Stories

Lucy Corin

Tin House Books: 188 pp., $13.95 paper