About the Author

Kate Wheeler is the author of Not Where I Started From and When Mountains Walked. She has received a Guggenheim award, an NEA, a Whiting Award, and two O. Henry Awards. She lives near Boston and teaches meditation retreats around the country and in Mexico.

Charles Johnson is the National Book Award-winning author of Middle Passage as well as Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing. He is also the subject of the new book, Charles Johnson's Fiction.

Reviews

"A milestone in Buddhist fiction. . . . Vigilant readers may have noticed a growing number of novels with Buddhist themes, but you wont see a Buddhist fiction shelf in bookstores. It's out there, but it hasn't been easy to find. Until now. In Nixon Under the Bodhi Tree, Kate Wheeler has assembled a marvelous collection of stories, inspired, in one way or another, by Buddhism. They range in length from a few lines to several thousand words, and cover topics as diverse as driving, acting, politics, food, birth, rebirth, love, death, murder, suicide, animal adoption, and lawn mowing. Certain themes emerge--we meet monks and nuns and earnest and not-so-earnest meditators--but there are plenty of surprises. As novelist and scholar Charles Johnson writes in his elegant foreword, these stories succeed because they 'dramatize the dharma by taking us intimately into the loves of their characters, ' and show us 'how the Buddhist experience is simply the human experience.' This volume is surely a milestone in Western Buddhist literature--and a book that fiction lovers, Buddhist or otherwise will very much enjoy."-- "Tricycle"