They call him the boss... He is Dr, James Brockman-- his battleground a major medical center on the East Coast.

Brain Surgeon

Shainberg, Lawrence

Fawcett

Ambivalent Zen

Biographies & Memoirs

Random House Value Publishing

Relentlessly pursuing illumination, struggling to let go of identity, desire, belief and certainty, Shainberg faces down and learns to accept the Backward Law, "Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it." This unique, courageous memoir tells of one man's attempt to infuse his daily life with the elusive wisdom of Zen.

AMBIVALENT ZEN: A Memoir

Religion & Spirituality

Buddhism

Pantheon

Seeking help with his basketball game, Shainberg embraced Zen Buddhism in 1951 and was catapulted on a life-long spiritual journey. Alternately comic and reverential, Ambivalent Zen chronicles the rewards and dangers of spiritual ambition and presents a poignant reflection of the experiences faced by many Americans involved in the Zen movement.

Ambivalent Zen : One Man's Adventures on the Dharma Path

Leaders & Notable People

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Memories of Amnesia

Brain surgeon Izzac Drogin experiences firsthand the mysterious, frightening, and hilarious intricacies of the human mind when he begins to lose his to amnesia

Literature & Fiction

Ivy Books

United States

UNKNO

“Wild as sin and as exceptional as the lower reaches of insanity itself.”—Norman Mailer
“One of the most perverse satires I’ve ever read.”—Jonathan Lethem
"[A] Vonnegut-worthy satire." —Joshua Glenn, Boston Globe
"A postmodern examination of the self that teases the very idea of postmodernism... that rare bit of lampoonery that is both humorous and smart." —Tod Goldberg, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Half DeLillo's Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler studies at College-on-the-Hill, and half Christopher Hitchens, Linchak is a model pundit for a post-9/11 age: death-obsessed, long-winded, addicted to Googling himself, and, on the sly, an inveterate nose-picker. Crust is about mindless compulsion, or the digital search for oblivion, or a comment on the jaded habits of a citizenry that's had its private domain annexed by omnipotent admen." —Zach Baron, Village Voice
The epigraph for this uproarious novel is from Marcel Duchamp: “Everything that man handles has a tendency to secrete meaning.” In this case, the secretion begins as a crust in the nose of famed novelist Walker Linchak. Its extraction leads to further secretion in the form of intellectual and spiritual insight into “the habit once called nose-picking”; a book, The Complete Book of Nasalism, a memoir about his breakthrough; an endless succession of blog entries; and a constant rush of e-mail exchanges with friends like George W. Bush, who is moved by Linchak’s passion for the habit to confess his own on Larry King Live.
Joining the stream of nose-picking research and literature that already exists on the Internet, Linchak’s secretion generates more of the same in books, the visual arts, all forms of media, academic scholarship, and medical and scientific research on crusts and their extraction.
Crust is the book that Swift would produce if he took on Information Glut.
Lawrence Shainberg is the author of two novels—One on One and Memories of Amnesia—and the nonfiction books Brain Surgeon: An Intimate View of His World and Ambivalent Zen. His fiction and journalism have appeared in Esquire, Harper’s Magazine, Tricycle, and The New York Times Magazine. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for a monograph on Samuel Beckett, published in The Paris Review.

Crust

Humor & Satire

Two Dollar Radio

From Pushcart Prize-winning author Lawrence Shainberg, a funny and powerful memoir about literary friendships, writing, and Zen practice. “Inexplicably good karma”—to this, author Lawrence Shainberg attributes a life filled with relationships with legendary writers and renowned Buddhist teachers. In Four Men Shaking he weaves together the narratives of three of those relationships: his literary friendships with Samuel Beckett and Norman Mailer, and his teacher-student relationship with the Japanese Zen master Kyudo Nakagawa Roshi. In Shainberg’s lifelong pursuit of both writing and Zen practice, each of these men represents an important aspect of his experience. The audacious, combative Mailer becomes a symbol in Shainberg’s mind for the Buddhist concept of “form,” while the elusive and self-deprecating Beckett seems to embody an awareness of “emptiness.” Through it all is Nakagawa, the earthy, direct Zen master challenging Shainberg to let go of his endless rumination and accept reality as it is.

Four Men Shaking: Searching for Sanity with Samuel Beckett, Norman Mailer, and My Perfect Zen Teacher

Arts & Literature

Shambhala

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Books by Shainberg, Lawrence