Zen City [Paperback]

STARRED REVIEWAuthor and performance artist Fintushel (Breakfast with the Ones You Love) blends Asian philosophy with science fiction in a mind-melting exploration of love, loss, and cultural appropriation. Like every other hick on the outside of the City, Big Man dreams of gaining access to it: a place of pure Buddha-nature, where every inhabitant has abandoned desire and reached a state of absolute oneness. Unable to enter by official channels, Big Man enlists the help of his would-be lover, Angela, to sneak in through a back way. In the process, he attracts the attention of the supposed bodhisattva No Mind and the less-than-holy Buddhist teacher Bobo Shin, who pursue him into the City for their own ends. Each character is fascinatingly developed in a somewhat Dadaist fashion, all while moving the plot along. Fintushels goal is never to mock or deride Buddhism itself, but rather to expose the ways in which the Eightfold Path is corrupted by human nature; in that regard, this book succeeds brilliantly, deftly weaving a tragic romance thats about all of us, and none at all.From the author of Breakfast with the Ones You Love comes Zen City. This thought-experiment novella brilliantly critiques spirituality in America.The world of ZEN CITY is a world of passionate desires: the desire for power, the desire for order, and the desire for self-transcendence. ZEN CITY is a story about the struggle and violence of people who see themselves as striving for the ultimate. Along the way, ZEN CITY presents a sly critique of the practice and perversions of imported spirituality in twentieth-century America.Eliot Fintushel is a prolific science-fiction writer with scores of short stories, many of them anthologized in Best Of collections. His novel Breakfast With The Ones You Love is available from Random House. Eliot is also an award winning performance artist. He studied real Zen for many years, working on koans at the goad of the stick.