Awake: Stories of Life-Changing Epiphanies

This is a nice collection. Don't be fooled (or discouraged) by the packaging, which tries to market these short pieces as "therapy and inspirational self-help". That makes them sound like New Age fluff. They're actually well-selected extracts and complete stories from some of literature's best writers. What they share is a moment in which the protagonist or the writer suddenly understands something significant - either about themselves, about life, or about the nature of reality. Commendably, editor Thomas Dyja doesn't skew his selection towards religion or to one particular philosophy, but rather gives us as broad a range of epiphanies as he does writing styles. There are some nice juxtapositions: none better than putting Henry James' dense yet rewarding "The Beast in the Jungle" up against a delightfully fresh extract from Jean Shepherd's "In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash". What his selections show, time and again, is one of the great virtues of literature: the way it speaks up for what is hidden, for what we might otherwise have missed. It whispers through the fissures of the world.