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Killing the Buddha

James Agee’s Aperture of Awe

When a friend told me (late Thursday) it was National Punctuation Day I got upset.  I wished I’d known earlier; I would have done something.  When the knee-jerk regret wore…

Killing the Buddha

Recession Special: Buddha Killing in L.A.

Live in the Los Angeles area? Have the perfect Buddha-killing story but need to work on how to tell it? Low on cash? You’re in luck. KtB contributor extraordinaire Gordon…

By egor.gribanov via Flickr

A Meaningful Story

From Essential Stories: God, Love, Death, Joy, Suffering, Beauty.

Killing the Buddha

Become a Buddha-killer in L.A.

KtB contributor Gordon Haber will be offering a crash course in religion writing this Fall. For those of you in the L.A. area, it’s sure to be the perfect chance…

Killing the Buddha

Universality in Fiction

In response to David Plante’s “The Meaning of Rain,” from his ongoing series Essential Stories, reader Jennifer Capo writes: It’s an interesting point that you bring up about trusting the…

road

The Passions of Khalifa Hakeem

A cub reporter gets on the bus with the Pakistani big boys.

David Plante

Essential Stories

I like to think of Blaise Pascal, though fiction didn’t much concern him, when trying to understand why fiction has more and more been reduced to details of quotidian life…

Killing the Buddha

Journalism as an Encounter

People usually don’t like what’s written about them. If you’ve ever been quoted in an article somewhere, you know that journalists mess up and mangle what you say beyond recognition.…

Killing the Buddha

Killing Writing

Jim Willis says: Equally, the writer should kill writing. What are we left with when this doesn’t happen? And yet, it will be said that we would never in that…

james-agee-by-evans

Curious, Obscene, Terrifying, and Unfathomably Mysterious

I am going off to write about people. An ordinary proposition, it would seem, particularly for a person who makes a living writing for people and, typically, about people or…

vonnegut3

Give Up Now, Young Writer

I was 15 when Kurt Vonnegut blew my mind. Good timing. I had never read anything so fantastically alive as Cat’s Cradle, his apocalyptic story of invented religion in a…

Killing the Buddha

You Too Can Be a Buddha-killer

Always wanted to kill Buddhas but feel you lack the weapons? Well, you’re not alone. That’s why Buddha-killer Gordon Haber will be running a special fiction workshop this summer. He…

Killing the Buddha

The Impertinence of Mountains

National Review‘s latest issue features a cover cartoon of Sonia Sotomayor as the Buddha — as if that’s a bad thing. Pakistani painter Asma Ahmed Shikoh depicts the Statue of…

Killing the Buddha

Cathedral Center Court

Earlier today, Roger Federer came back from being down two sets to one to punch his ticket to a fourth consecutive French Open final. He’s never won it all on…

The Great Heresy

Regions of the Great Heresy

At the 92nd Street Y tonight, I joined KtB author Ann Neumann for a lecture by the Israeli novelist David Grossman on Bruno Schulz. Jonathan Safran Foer, in turn, introduced…

My Bible

The Pleasure of the Text

Jean-Luc Marion, at the outset of God without Being: One must admit that theology, of all writing, certainly causes the greatest pleasure. During the year of my becoming a Catholic,…

Killing the Buddha

Not That Kind of Girl

Carlene Bauer does not care for the new biography of Flannery O’ Connor by Brad Gooch: Aquinas is described as having “lofty, lucent prose” — which is like saying Plato…

Marc Chagall, La Danse

Must One Describe?

The air here is always dry. Thin, but also thick. A white pipe the width of a soda can reaches from floor to ceiling, making the never-ending music of a…