PROSE BY DAVID KHERDIAN

On a Spaceship With Beelzebub: By a Grandson of Gurdjieff

In this book, David Kherdian tells the "inside" story of the powerful Gurdjieff Work of self-development and self-change.

 

Meet Alvin Tolliver, a quiet boy who seldom fits in with other kids. Life begins to change for Alvin when he meets four special people from whom he learns important lessons about the natural world. Because of his new friends, Alvin discovers that he’s really not alone in the world. Even more, he learns the world is more magical than he ever realized.

 

A biographic study of six poets of the 1960s San Francisco renaissance.

 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Gary Snyder

Philip Whalen

David Meltzer

Michael McClure

Brother Antoninus 

 

With an introduction by William Saroyan. 

Kherdian proceeds with the stately thoroughness of an old-fashioned Armenian artisan, one who takes sustenance from the work itself. By scrupulously giving us the light and dark, stone and wood, earth and water, flesh and pulse, of his own coming into consciousness as the child of Armenian immigrants, he finds a language that takes the reader, too, back to a common ground that refreshes and renews. In the end, he’s tracing nothing less than the geography of the soul. 

—William Saroyan 

THEODORE CZEBOTAR AND DAVID KHERDIAN were the first recognized artists to come out of Racine, and here, appropriately, the latter has written an encomium in homage to the first, with the similarities in their lives being such that Kherdian could not tell Czebotar’s story without filtering it through his own, making this a portrait, both directly and indirectly of two artists, and just as importantly of the city that was the inspirational source of their early work. This is a book about a people, a time, and a place, and of the compelling forces that drive an artist to create.

Recipient of:

Newbery Honor Book
Boston Globe / Horn Book Award
Lewis Carroll Bookshelf Award
Banta Award

Nomination for the American Book Award

For as long as I knew the sky and the clouds, we lived in our white stucco house in the Armenian quarter of Azizya, in Turkey, but when the great dome of Heaven cracked and shattered over our lives, and we were abandoned by the sun and blown like scattered seed across the Arabian desert, none returned but me, and my Azizya, my precious home, was made to crumble and fall and forever disappear from my life.

The Story of An Awakened Life

 

This is the first account of the Buddha's story that blends the elements of history, legend, and Buddhist teachings into a compelling narrative.