When Lucas Silver, who is trying to run away, and his friend Miles and two girls they know, Jasmine and Vanessa, step out of Hob and Bogie's Olde Curiosity Shoppe, they discover that they have agreed to play a match of Champion's Quest, a role-playing game--played from inside the game with goblins, trolls, witches, and a three-headed monster.

Intend to do everything ... to have one way of evaluating experience--does it cause me pleasure or pain, and I shall be very cautious about rejecting the painful--I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it too, for it is everywhere! I shall involve myself wholly ... everything matters! So wrote Susan Sontag in May 1949 at the age of sixteen. This, the first of three volumes of her journals and notebooks, presents a constantly and utterly surprising...