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

SOME of the insights are ordinary: “There’s something exquisite about everyone getting along,” muses the narrator of “My Favorite Dentist.” “It’s true that I never think of you except when I’m with you, and I never remember my previous dentists except when I’m admiring my current dentist: you.” “Midgets often marry each other, like celebrities,” begins another story. “Simpletons often marry each other.” Many stories in this debut collection (Corin, who teaches at UC Davis, has also written a novel, “Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls”) begin like this, as if we’d caught the narrator in thought. “Some Machines” begins: “Started off I felt afraid of any electric cord.” And “Baby in a Body Cast” begins: “In the corner, the baby looked in the direction his body cast cast him.” But once you crawl into the tunnel of these stories, the insights are anything but ordinary: “The baby fell asleep and in his dreams he saw the insides of tulips come to encase his face and then move past like red- and peach-colored mist.” Pure sleight of hand. How is it done? Come closer, I’ll tell you. She closes her eyes and watches the movies playing 24-7 inside the lids. “Here, upside down and overbalanced, the thing that happens is not what I make happen, it’s what I am within the definition of suspense.”

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com