Personal ReflectionsMagazine | Feature
Circling Emptiness
Recalling his friendships with Norman Mailer and Samuel Beckett, a Zen student and writer grapples with a central Buddhist teaching.
Lawrence Shainberg
Lawrence Shainberg is an author and novelist whose books include the celebrated Zen memoir Ambivalent Zen and Memories of Amnesia. His Pushcart Prize-winning monograph of conversations with Samuel Beckett was first published in The Paris Review in 1987.
Yasutani Roshi: The Hardest Koan
Brian Victoria uncovers the wartime anti-Semitism of one of America’s most seminal Zen masters. Responses to this material from: Robert Aitken, Bernie Glassman, Bodhin Kjolhede, and Lawrence Shainberg
Podcasts
Staring at the Wall with Samuel Beckett and Norman Mailer
Writer and longtime Zen student Lawrence Shainberg joins Tricycle Editor and Publisher James Shaheen to discuss his new book, Four Men Shaking: Searching for Sanity with Samuel Beckett, Norman Mailer, and My Perfect Zen Teacher. They talk about Shainberg’s struggles as a practitioner and an author and how he brings them together in his new memoir, which recounts his conversations with his literary heroes, Samuel Beckett and Norman Mailer, along with his teacher, Roshi Kyudo Nakagawa.
You can read an excerpt from Four Men Shaking in our Fall 2019 issue.
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