Occasionally you stumble upon a website that raises more questions than it provides answers. Sometimes this is a good thing. In the case of Special Reflection, it’s a great thing. The website collects drawings and posters and music by (we think) various people connected by some mechanism that we can’t quite divine.

Anyone out there have more information? If so, offer it up. If not, just enjoy the treasures of the site under the auspices of anonymity. After all: a good drawing is a good drawing, no matter who made it.

Vijay Khurana’s personal mini-zine Aeroplanes Exist is an offering in the time-honored tradition of personal mini-zines. It is quarter-sized, written on a charmingly jumpy typewriter, and embellished with carefully-chosen images notable for their metaphorical impact and obliquity.

The writing is hard to describe. Little stories, snippets of recalled conversation, fragments of aphorisms, all woven together in a delicate balance. It’s available at Bird in the Hand Zine Shop, and we can think of nothing better to carry in your back pocket.

Until Danny Espinoza gets his website up, we’re gonna have to settle for obsessive viewing of his flickr page. Espinoza’s drawings and illustrations have a lightness and humor that we can’t get enough of. He’s like that kid in high school chemistry class that you always wanted to pass notes with. We’re enchanted and intrigued.

Dollars to donuts this book got optioned the second it rolled off the presses. One need only list the ingredients to visualize the dollar signs popping up in movie exec eyes: a Harvard-educated preppy kid named Michael Teak performs spy business in Africa, investigates a rebel leader named Hatashil, and witnesses the bombing of an entire village under mysterious circumstances. Meanwhile, a Harvard professor who has won a Pulitzer Prize for a book heralding Hatashil as a renegade hero receives threats indicating that the freedom-fighter may be a terrorist. Plot threads intertwine. Kalashnikovs appear. Swahlili is spoken.

In other words, An Expensive Education is a book that combines suspense-novel hijinx with the interior world of a Holden Caulfield type (albeit a Holden who speaks Arabic and carries a handgun.) What’s not to love?

Reading may be a universally beloved pastime, but good books aren’t necessarily universal. Language takes care of that. Books available only in their native French or Spanish or Czech may be amazing, but for those limited to a different tongue, they may as well exist in a parallel universe.

That’s why it’s such a pleasure to find that Italian wordsmith Stefano Benni has seen his novel Margherita Dolce Vita freshly translated into English. Benni–– a hugely famous satirist in his native country––is long overdue for American adulation, and Margherita is a perfect place to start.

The title character is a spunky young girl prone to fantasizing and wordplay; a kid whose braces clash when she smooches her boyfriend “like a duel in the Illiad”. A skewed constellation of family members and a mysterious neighbor seal the premise, with Margherita cast as resourceful and unlikely savior. Best part of all? There’s no need to splurge on an Italian-English dictionary in order to read the novel. Molto sweet-o.