Readers BEWARE This is a novel built in layers. Snippets of details and the emotions of what seems to be, at first, a confused and lost narrator are put into short "Dispatches" that slowly evolve into a dystopian world where books and the cleaning of old books stacked in endless rows become the center of existence. There is first a bookkeeper and then the bookkeeper is gone as the narrator struggles to learn about his job in an enormous, dusty warehouse. And what about Paige? Who is the young girl in the earliest dispatches?This is not our everyday world, although we are never sure whether the story is set in our world or in some timeless universe where books are everything. Characters appear and disappear as the trilogy's three books unfurl. Cats and a dog become important as the story rollicks onward. Robots (or are they robots?) take over the writer's, the trilogy's, I and then lead him away from the reality he believes he has lived, the one with the mysterious woman in his bed. Then there are the story characters running and roaming as they try to avoid fates that seem to hover just beyond where they are. And always, always, there are the books you blow on to clean, bringing them back to life so that their pages become part of who you are.This is as unusual a book of literature you will ever read even if you love Kurt Vonnegut or Franz Kafka. I'm glad to welcome back in the saddle my old boss Phil Pfuehler, who, as editor of the River Falls Journal , turned out a remarkably great, award-winning paper. "The Breathing Pages" displays the deeper artistic elements of his many talents and addresses more profoundly his passion for the printed word, which, in Pfuehler's trilogy, has the power to create and destroy, uplift and vanquish, terrify, mystify, and illumine anyone with the will to take it on. - Dave Wood, columnist, Wisconsin author, and past Vice-President of the National Book Critics Circle. Ruth Wood , English Professor Emeritus at University of Wisconsin River Falls and occasionally a professional editor. Imagine, if you will, one of Beckett's narrators wandering Borges's labyrinths and Auster's cityscapes with only a library card to remind them of who they are. Such giddy disorientation is akin to what I felt reading. Phil Pfuehler's The Breathing Pages . Inventive and immersive, Pfuehler's work pays homage to books while embodying his own title-these pages pulsate and remind us that books might very well be wildly alive, reading us as much as we do them. - Tim Horvath , author of Understories With "Breathing Pages," writer Phil Pfuehler makes his novelistic debut with a wholly original creation that penetrates the imagination. Pfuehler takes the reader on a stimulating - at times mystical - ride that evokes the films of Charlie Kaufman as his characters morph and shapeshift from one dream-like state to another, where thrills, humor and existential revelations are cleverly woven into a mobius strip narrative that's truly one of a kind. -Mike Longaecker , county government communications specialist, former journalist Philip Pfuehler grew up in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, and is a University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire journalism graduate who spent most of his newspaper career as editor for the River Falls Journal. He also edited suburban papers in the Twin Cities of Minnesota and has published prose poems in several literary magazines. Pfuehler and his wife, Kim, a social worker, are retired and live in Sturgeon Bay. They have two adult children, Maria and Julia, and two granddaughters.