A LOOK AT THE ENDURING MYSTERY OF DAVID LYNCH At once a pop-culture icon, cult figure, and film industry outsider, master filmmaker David Lynch and his work defy easy defi-nition. Dredged from his subconscious mind, Lynch's work is primed to act on our own subconscious, combining heightened, contradictory emotions into something familiar but inscrutable. No less than his art, Lynch's life also evades simple categoriza-tion, encompassing pursuits as a musician, painter, photographer, carpenter, entrepre-neur, and vocal proponent of Transcendental Meditation. David Lynch: The Man from Another Place, Dennis Lim's remarkably smart and concise book, proposes several lenses through which to view Lynch and his work: through the age-old mysteries of the uncanny and the sublime, through the creative energies of surrealism and postmodernism, through ideas of America and theories of good and evil. Lynch himself often warns against overinterpreta-tion. And accordingly, this is not a book that seeks to decode his art or annotate his life— to dispel the strangeness of the Lynchian-so much as one that offers complementary ways of seeing and understanding one of the most distinctive bodies of work in modern cinema. Its spirit is true to its subject, in remaining suggestive rather than definitive, in allowing what Lynch likes to call "room to dream," and in honoring the allure of the unknown and the unknowable. DENNIS LIM is a writer and film curator in New York City and the director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. A former contributor to the New York Times, he is also the editor of The Village Voice Film Guide: 50 Years of Movies from Classics to Cult Hits (2006).