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Three works on big questions from the novelist's bookshelf.
In Bonnie Nadzam's debut novel, Lamb, winner of the 2011 Center for Fiction's Flaherty Dunnan First Novel Prize, a middle-aged man grieving after the death of his father forms an unlikely bond with an 11-year-old girl. But far from a prurient cringe-fest in the vein of To Catch a Predator, Nadzam's novel is a nuanced portrait of a serial dissembler unraveling. Our reviewer, Veronique de Turenne, celebrates "the gorgeous and grotesque in Nadzam's unsettling vision." Read the full review here. This week, the author points us to a trio of favorites.
Cultivating the Empty Field: The Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi
By Hongzhi Zhengjue, translated by Taigen Dan Leighton and Yi Wu
"This is a work of fragments/illuminations by twelfth-century Chinese monk Hongzi Zhengjue, spiritual predecessor of the perhaps better-known Eihei Dogen. It is gentle and strange and life-changing -- a real treasure. While strictly speaking this is an articulation of the 'silent illumnation' of Zen practice, it is likewise an articulation of spirituality, of poetry, of philosphy, of being."
By Herman Hesse
"Some of Hesse's earliest work, this is the fictional story of Hans Giebernath who realizes too late (though truly he has always known) that serious scholarship and pursuing a life of the mind are not enough to learn how to be a human being. Along with Hans, the reader gets a sense of what are not only other possibilities, but also other requirements in learning to be fully human."
By Jack Turner
"Jack Turner, a former philosophy professor, asks important questions about wildness/the wild: What is it? What is it not? How have some contemporary efforts to wed us to 'wilderness' divorced us even further from it? Conservation, restoration, and preservation may themselves be to blame. His meditations on what we lose when 'wildness' becomes an abstract concept (and he argues it has) suggest the stakes are high."
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With dates announced for his upcoming Old Ideas concert tour, we celebrate the inimitable Leonard Cohen: bard, survivor, legend. His most recent album is a return to form for the balladeer, exploring signature themes of lust and longing, spirituality and struggle, all overlaid with a droll sense of humor as familiar as Cohen's prophetic voice.
When Jack Luxton hears that his estranged brother has been killed in combat, long-buried memories begin to well up like groundwater, and difficult choices Jack thought he reconciled himself to years ago turn out to be close at hand. Man Booker Prize-winner Graham Swift's novel plumbs timeless themes of regret, renewal, and the bonds of love.
The opening story in Matthew Battles's electric collection, "The Dogs in the Trees", documents the inexplicable appearance of arboreal canines. Further gorgeous fantastika follows, producing a volume sure to draw comparisons to Borges and George Saunders.
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