Hi All,

Welcome to our Midsummer Newsletter of reviews, store events, and news. In this one, we've added the new Book Club Rex: a great recommendation for your book group. We welcome brief reviews from book club members recommending their favorite book club choices. Just email back to this newsletter with your reviews. There will also be a page on our website with all of the recommendations, for future consultation.

As many of you know, we are opening a new bookstore soon in Los Angeles, at the Brentwood Country Mart! Construction is well underway and we are looking at a September opening. We'll keep you posted on the progress and on the actual Opening Date! We're very busy and very excited by it all! Please check our events calendar for upcoming events at each of our stores and for news about the new store. It's August, a wonderful time for reading, reading, reading.

Enjoy!
John & all Dieselfolk

The Lazarus Project (Hardcover)

By Aleksandar Hemon

$24.95

ISBN-13: 9781594489884
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Riverhead Hardcover, 5/2008

Other Editions of this Title

The Lazarus Project is an odyssey. Imagine the Wizard of Oz, but instead of Dorothy there is a lonely Bosnian-American writer named Brik. He is lost, married to an American brain surgeon who only reminds him of the gap between his Bosnian past and his American present. Then there is Lazarus, a young Ukrainian Jew in turn-of-the-century Chicago, who was shot and killed by the chief of police. Brik is fascinated by Lazarus' story. He wins a grant to write about him and off he goes with his photographer friend Rora, through abandoned eastern European villages, brothels and cemeteries in search of the young Lazarus and the old Sarajevo. And the wizard? There is no wizard. Only a compelling journey through fact and fiction, the living and the dead, to find out who has the best story to tell. -- Colin

---

When You Are Engulfed in Flames (Hardcover)

By David Sedaris

$25.99

ISBN-13: 9780316143479
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Little, Brown and Company, 6/2008

Other Editions of this Title

How can you possibly capture the brilliance of David Sedaris? I started off writing this review using the strongest praising vocabulary I could think of, such as sidesplitting, ingeniously observant, cruelly magnificent, but I realized that wouldn't be enough; David Sedaris is indescribable. Each short essay is woven together with the utmost attention to detail. A true comedian, David Sedaris highlights the phenomena in today's society that we take for granted, universal details that when brought to light leads one to realize that modernity and the crazy people that compose our society are viciously funny. Read this and I promise you will not stop laughing. (Caution: people will give you odd looks when you spontaneously start roaring with laughter in public places). -- Izzy

---

Machine (Hardcover)

By Peter Adolphsen, Charlotte Barslund

$15.00

ISBN-13: 9781596922877
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: MacAdam/Cage Publishing, 6/2008

Other Editions of this Title

Adolphsen's slim novella manages to pack the last 55 million years of the earth into eighty-five pages. That alone is marvelous, yet Adolphsen pours into this slight container thoughts on science, culture, and metaphysics. Wildly inventive, this concise and intense story traces how three lives intersect and ultimately blend through space and time. Upon the novella's conclusion, Adolphsen leaves us a parting gift: a question. Exactly what is the machine of which he speaks? - Trevor

---