A while back I reviewed David Mitchell’s Post-Secular World: Buddhism, Belief and the Urgency of Compassion (2019), by Rose Harris-Birtill for Religion and Literature, a journal published by the University of Notre Dame. Harris-Birtill’s work is important for Buddhist fiction because it is the first text written by a solo scholar about one individual author whose work inhabits and purports a Buddhist worldview: David Mitchell. He wrote Cloud Atlas (2004), The Bone Clocks (2014), and Utopia Avenue (2020) to name just a few of his novels. This is big! It means that Buddhist fiction is truly starting to be recognized in the academy.
While I cannot post the whole review here for copyright reasons, I can post the opening paragraph.
You can find the full review through the Project Muse database. Here is the citation:
Beek, Kimberly. Review of David Mitchell’s Post-Secular World: Buddhism, Belief and the Urgency of Compassion, by Rose Harris-Birtill. Religion & Literature 54, no. 3 (2022): 171-173.
Enjoy!
Buddhist Fiction Blog 