SCRIPT IDEA #142: Space aliens undercover as cabbies abduct the fiancée of the main character and he has to find a way to a remote planet to save her. Title: Love Trek. Joshua Levin has a reasonably comfortable Chicago apartment, a mildly dysfunctional family sprinkled throughout the suburbs, a steady job teaching ESL, a devoted girl- friend who lives just down the block, and a laptop fairly bristling with screenplay ideas-one of which, he thinks, might turn out to be good: Zombie Wars.

SCRIPT IDEA #196: A rock star high out of his mind freaks out during his show, runs off the stage, and finds himself lost in a city whose name he can't recall, but whose streets are crowded with his hallucinations... Mishaps and adventures follow. This one could be a musical: Singin' in the Brain. But it takes just a few unexpected events-namely, his already unhinged army vet of a landlord experiencing something of a psychotic break, and a moment of weakness or two with his sultry Bosnian student-for Joshua's comfortable life to descend into chaos. All of which hap- pens to coincide with the heady days of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

SCRIPT IDEA #185: A teenager discovers that his girlfriend's beloved grandfather was a guard in a Nazi death camp. The boy's grand- parents are survivors, but he's tantalizingly close to achieving deflowerment, so when a Nazi hunter arrives in town in pursuit of Grandpa, he has to distract him long enough to get laid. A riotous Holocaust comedy. Title: Righteous Lust. As the stakes quickly move from the indulgent to the absurd to the life-and-death, The Making of Zombie Wars takes on real consequence. With this novel Aleksandar Hemon shows that he is able to change register without leaving behind any of the urgency, inventiveness, and authority that have established him as one of the essential writers of our time.