Randy Rosenthal

Jul 26, 2024 | tricycle.org | Randy Rosenthal

Over the years of reading Buddhist scriptures, I’ve always been struck by passages where the Buddha travels to other realms to teach the dharma to divine beings. I’ve been fascinated by images of bodhisattvas riding on clouds and flying in lotus position. The idea of a Pure Land in the far west of the universe sounds pretty much like an alien world.

Jul 13, 2024 | washingtonpost.com | Randy Rosenthal

I live in a 150-year-old home outside Boston, and immediately after my wife and I moved in, we knew the place was haunted. When I told my downstairs neighbor about our experience, she didn’t bat an eye — people expect ghosts to inhabit old New England houses. Such a house lies at the center of J. Courtney Sullivan’s exquisitely layered new novel, “The Cliffs,” which is set in a touristy beach town in southern Maine.

Jun 26, 2024 | bostonglobe.com | Randy Rosenthal

Julia Phillips’s 2019 debut novel, “Disappearing Earth,” was universally praised as a uniquely brilliant work of literary excellence. About the kidnapping of two sisters on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Far East, the book was consistently tense and ingeniously structured; with one chapter for each month of a year, each from a different character’s perspective: a masterpiece of storytelling. With such a phenomenal start, it’s perhaps inevitable that any follow-up would be disappointing.

May 3, 2024 | tricycle.org | Randy Rosenthal |Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac’s two most popular books—On the Road and The Dharma Bums—showed people they could live a completely different way of life: a bohemian existence at odds with postwar American consumerism. Both books are about freedom. Both depict a life free from thirty-year mortgages, nine-to-five jobs, conventional relationships, and family responsibilities. They present the liberating idea that you could do whatever you want with your life—what you want to do, not just what you were supposed to do.

Jan 24, 2024 | bostonglobe.com | Randy Rosenthal

In Japan there’s a kind of tea party where the guests agree to talk only about what’s inside the room they’re in. Avoiding politics or gossip, they look around and notice things they otherwise wouldn’t. For example, look at how this shade of blue on my teacup matches the shade of blue of the wallpaper’s trim, or how the flowers are arranged so that the petals are perfectly backlit by the afternoon sunlight streaming through the windows.