Four Men Shaking
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Shambhala Publications07/16/2019Pages: 144Size: 5 x 7ISBN: 9781611807295Details“Inexplicably good karma”—to this, author Lawrence Shainberg attributes a life filled with relationships with legendary writers and renowned Buddhist teachers. In Four Men Shaking he weaves together the narratives of three of those relationships: his literary friendships with Samuel Beckett and Norman Mailer, and his teacher-student relationship with the Japanese Zen master Kyudo Nakagawa Roshi. In Shainberg’s lifelong pursuit of both writing and Zen practice, each of these men shaped his experience. The audacious, combative Mailer comes to represent, for Shainberg, the Buddhist concept of "form," while the elusive and self-deprecating Beckett seems to embody an awareness of "emptiness." Through it all is Nakagawa, the earthy, direct Zen master challenging Shainberg to let go of his endless rumination and accept reality as it is.RelatedCheck items to add to the cart orAuthor BioLawrence Shainberg is the author of the celebrated Zen memoir Ambivalent Zen as well as the nonfiction book Brain Surgeon: An Intimate View of His World. He has published three novels—Crust, One on One, and Memories of Amnesia—and his fiction and journalism have appeared in Esquire, Harper's Magazine, Tricycle, and The New York Times Magazine. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for a monograph on Samuel Beckett, published in The Paris Review.Praise"A deeply necessary utterance, one effortlessly delivered after decades of rigorous preparation. By the time I finished it I was a fifth man shaking, and with gratitude." —Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn
"Shainberg has done the impossible: taken three entirely different lives and woven them together so they form a fourth—an honest, wide-eyed but sage narrator who can both thumb-wrestle and meditate. The book combines humor and wisdom in an original and totally engaging narrative." —John Skoyles, author of A Moveable Famine and Secret Frequencies: A New York Education
"Shainberg’s enlightening memoir about three transformative relationships is accessible, deceptively simple, and wise." —Publishers Weekly
"Beckett was right about Shainberg’s gifts as an observer." —Harper's Magazine
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