"It begins with a boy, a young boy, who is perhaps a girl, but does not know it yet," she writes before drifting into elegant rhapsody about a summer of love, tragedy, desire, longing-the tender aches of youth that never really fade. In The Endless Summer (Open Letter, $14.95), Danish performance artist Madame Nielsen stretches long sentences into an evocative, nostalgic trance. Dream states are a fitting analogy for the reading process, and recently, I was impressed to discover two books that have translated that Morphean experience onto the page. It popped into my head later that what I remembered was the hazy dream of three days spent reading Herman Koch's The Dinner (Hogarth, $16), which is drowning in grappa. I harbored a distinct, albeit foggy, memory of a very long dinner involving copious amounts of the stuff. Nick frowned and replied, "I've never had grappa." That couldn't be right, I insisted. "Who were we with that night we drank all that grappa?" I asked. Several years ago, I was in a small Italian restaurant with my boyfriend, and I became intrigued by the grappa selection.
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