On the horizon

Sometimes, you just know a book will be good and can't wait to give it a read and add it to your collection. It's even better when you know that a select group of friends and acquaintances will be reading it, too.

A publisher I trust is Farrar, Straus and Giroux. FSG brings out some of the finest writing each year, although its titles rarely become the blockbusters you would read about in People magazine.

One book I'm looking forward to is American Purgatorio, by John Haskell. It paints a picture of one man's condition of bewildered grief after the mysterious disappearance of his wife. The pilgrimage that follows promises much in the way of philosophy as the wrapping for a classic "quest" tale. Benjamin Kunkel, writing in The Nation, says this:

American Purgatorio ostensibly tracks the seven deadly sins rather than the four noble truths. Still, it seems to me the most Buddhist English-language novel I have read. It's difficult to follow Haskell's narrator from Brooklyn, through Boulder (capital, if anywhere is, of Buddhist America), and finally to beachside nirvana in San Diego, without thining of the precepts of nonattachment, overcoming desire and the unreality of self.