In The River at Night, Kevin Huizenga, author of the acclaimed series Ganges, delves deep into consciousness. What begins as a simple, distracted conversation between husband and wife becomes an exploration of being and the passage of time. It flashes back, first to satirize the dot-com boom of the late 1990s and then to examine the camaraderie of playing first-person shooter video games with work colleagues, to ponder what the passage of time feels like to geologists or productivity gurus. The River at Night is a modern formalist masterpiece as empathetic, inventive, and funny as anything ever written. (W/A/CA) Kevin Huizenga