Kabuki Boy by Perle Besserman

Releases March 2013.

Press kit forthcoming. Pre-Orders [forthcoming] will be made available on the Publications & Store page.

Recipient of the Theodore Hoepfner Fiction Award and past writer-in-residence at the Mishkenot Sha'ananim Artist Colony in Jerusalem, Pushcart Prize nominee Perle Besserman was praised by Isaac Bashevis Singer for the “clarity and feeling for mystic lore” of her writing and by Publisher’s Weekly for its “wisdom [that] points to a universal practice of the heart.” Her autobiographical novel, Pilgrimage, was published by Houghton Mifflin, and her electronic book story collection, Marriage and Other Travesties of Love, by Cantarabooks. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals both in print and online; these include The Southern Humanities Review, The Nebraska Review, Briarcliff Review, Transatlantic Review, 13th Moon, Bamboo Ridge, Lilith, Hurricane Alice, Crab Creek Review, Other Voices, Agni, Southerly, Page Seventeen, Midstream, Sketch Media, Kaimana, The Oddville Press, Dark Sky Magazine, The Sylvan Echo, Fiction Circus, Prick of the Spindle, Emprise Review, Stirring Fiction, Fogged Clarity, Cantaraville, Mixed Nerve, Cerise Press, SNReview, The Caper Literary Journal, The Write Room, Bearcreekfeed, and Untoward, among others.

Her books of creative non-fiction include Oriental Mystics and Magicians, The Way of Witches, Monsters: Their Histories, Homes, and Habits (Doubleday), The Private Labyrinth of Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano and the Cabbala (Holt), Kabbalah: The Way of the Jewish Mystic (Doubleday/Shambhala/ Barnes and Noble), The Way of the Jewish Mystics (Shambhala/Random House), Crazy Clouds: Zen Radicals, Rebels and Reformers (Manfred Steger, co-author, Shambhala/Random House), Owning It: Zen and the Art of Facing Life (Kodansha), The Shambhala Guide to Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism (Shambhala/Random House), Teachings of the Jewish Mystics (Shambhala/Random House), and Grassroots Zen (Manfred Steger, co-author, Tuttle). Her most recent books of creative non-fiction are A New Kabblah for Women (Palgrave and Griffin Paperback Edition), A New Zen for Women (Palgrave, and Sony e-book edition), and Zen Radicals, Rebels, and Reformers, co-authored with Manfred Steger, (Wisdom Publications).

Her books have been translated into German, Spanish, Japanese, Czech, Italian, Hebrew, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, Hungarian, and Thai. The audio book version of Kabbalah: The Way of the Jewish Mystic was recorded by Sounds True Audio Editions, Boulder, CO. Besserman has written for publications as varied as Mademoiselle, Manoa ( Honolulu), The Boston Globe, The Village Voice, A Different Drummer, Canadian Literature, and East West. She has appeared on national and international radio and television as well as in two Canadian documentary films about her work, and currently divides her time between Honolulu, Hawai’i and Melbourne, Australia.

About the Novel:
Perle Besserman’s Kabuki Boy is a novel of Japan set in and around the capital city of Edo (modern-day Tokyo) during the waning decades of the Tokugawa Era (1600-1868). Broadening the often narrowly focused literary and cinematic portrayals of samurai resistance to their declining social status, Besserman’s vivid narrative conveys that tumultuous period through the eyes of its peasants, priests, politicians, revolutionaries, mountebanks, geisha, and actors using the Kabuki theatre as a backdrop. Its nineteenth-century framework nested in a post-modern narrative by its fictional twentieth-century “editor,” a cultural historian and abbot of a Zen monastery one hundred miles from Tokyo, the book is comprised of memoirs, theatrical and monastery records, personal letters and journals, all centering on the life of a Kabuki boy actor whose brief but illustrious career reflects not only the “golden age of Kabuki Theatre,” but the most dramatic spiritual, political, and artistic events characterizing Japan’s violent emergence into the modern world.