This extraordinary tale involves Edward Moon, stage magician and detective, his silent sidekick the Somnambulist, and a devilish plot to re-create the apocalyptic prophecies of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and bring the British Empire crashing down.

'[A] lively, entertaining blend of murder mystery and supernatural adventure' George R. R. Martin Should you find yourself in need of a discreet investigation, think of Jesperson and Lane . . . For several years Miss Lane was companion, collaborator and friend to the lady known to the Psychical Society only as Miss X - until she discovered that Miss X was actually a fraud. Now Miss Lane works with Mr Jasper Jesperson as a consulting detective, but the cases are not as plentiful as they might be and money is getting tight - until a wife's concern for her husband's nocturnal ramblings piques their interest, and mediums begin to disappear all over London. There is only one team with the imagination and intelligence to uncover the nefarious purpose behind the vanished psychics and the somnambulist's wanderings. Jesperson and Lane: at your service.

Renowned internationally for her lyrically unsettling novels, PEN/Faulkner Award winner Chloe Aridjis now offers readers her first collection of shorter works, with an introduction by Tom McCarthy Chloe Aridjis’s stories and essays are known to transport readers into liminal, often dreamlike, realms. In this collection of works, we meet a woman guided only by a plastic bag drifting through the streets of Berlin who discovers a nonsense-named bar that is home to papier-mâché monsters and one glass-encased somnambulist. Floating through space, cosmonauts are confronted not only with wonder and astonishment, but tedium and solitude. And in Mexico City, stray dogs animate public spaces, “infusing them with a noble life force.” In her pen portraits, Aridjis turns her eye to expats and outsiders, including artists and writers such as Leonora Carrington, Mavis Gallant, and Beatrice Hastings. Exploring the complexity of exile and urban alienation, Dialogue with a Somnambulist showcases “the rare writer who reinvents herself in each book” (Garth Greenwell) and who is as imaginatively at home in the short form as in her longer fiction.

MINNEAPOLIS

Every film fan experiences a seemingly incalculable number of images during their cinematic pursuits. While some walk, run, or skip happily through film fandom, the terminally nostalgic Richard Glenn Schmidt sleepily stumbles through the superabundance of his filmic obsessions in an attempt to embrace them all. Contained within these pages are his musings on the utterly perverse films of Jess Franco, the purple cinema of Prince, the peculiar insanity of the films of 1976, the peregrine world of Asian horror, and much, much more! Somewhere between the waking world and the flickering dream of cinema, walks the Cinema Somnambulist. It's like the old saying goes, "every blogger has his day".