ISSUE 14: ESCAPE

02.25.2014

Books offer the ultimate form of escape. As kids, we hid under the covers and fled to far-off lands through the pages of our books. We buried our nose in the binding and forgot our surroundings, our friends, and our parents down the hall as we escaped our little lives for something bigger. And books’ capacity for escape evolves with us. What we once turned to for whimsy becomes a conduit for understanding our world. Whether we are the reader or the writer, we escape to books to enter the minds of others, and in turn, to better know ourselves.

This issue of Slice disrupts our everyday thinking before we even open the magazine. The cover art, a diorama titled “The Library as a Mine” by French artist Marc Giai-Miniet depicts burning books as a metaphor for humans and our inevitable vulnerability. Giai-Miniet says, “Not only can books, like human beings, be burnt, but also sometimes through the knowledge they convey, they may actually burn us, change us, lead us or lose us.” It’s impossible to escape change when we let a book into our life—whether it’s the perspective shift we were seeking, or something far less expected.

The writing in this issue won’t let you see your life as you did before. It’s the bruised relationship between a father and son; a brush with death by flood; a hypnotist’s spell. These are the stories you’ll escape to, and that will in turn, stay with you in more ways than you’d imagined.