“Buddhism and American Literature”

I did a thing! I have a chapter titled “Buddhism and American Literature” that has been published in The Oxford Handbook of American Buddhism, edited by Ann Gleig and Scott Mitchell. The book just came out late last month.

While I cannot post the entire chapter here, I will post a picture of the first paragraph because it is viewable in the “Read Sample” of the Amazon dot com website. The book is incredibly expensive so if you want to read the chapter, the cheapest way may be to acquire the book through a library loan.

Kimberly Beek. “Buddhism and American Literature” In The Oxford Handbook of American Buddhism, edited by Ann Gleig and Scott A. Mitchell, 499–515. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2024.

My Review of “David Mitchell’s Post-Secular World: Buddhism, Belief and the Urgency of Compassion” by Rose Harris-Birtill in the Religion and Literature Journal

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!