237 Lafayette St. near Spring St., tenth floor
Thursday, January 19, free with advance RSVP, 7:00
www.ethannichtern.com
Shastri Ethan Nichtern, a Shambhala teacher and founder of the Interdependence Project, has followed up his 2007 nonfiction trade paperback, One City, in which he examined egolessness, interdependence, enlightenment, and spirituality in a fun and fascinating way, with his fiction debut, the digital book Your Emoticons Won’t Save You. The breezy tale is set in 1998, when Alex Bardo and a group of his college-aged childhood friends are on a road trip to the camp they went to when they were kids, setting the stage for a series of memories and flashbacks about life, love, friendship, and growing up. “She looked like she was about to say something else about me, something très annoying about who I am and who I used to be and who I should become, but she didn’t,” narrator Alex says at one point about his former girlfriend. The story involves bad mix tapes, naked frolicking, car games, micro-losses of virginity, and the Wannabe Poets Brigade; the novel concludes with a selection of Alex’s poetry, featuring such titles as “A Wary Invitation to My Future Child,” “Urban Planning,” “Aw, Nuts,” and “A PostPostModern Definition of Egolessness.” If you read the fine print, you’ll discover that “aggression still tantalizes us,” “obsession’s like a bungee cord,” “delusion emits a steady hum,” “kids don’t get to make any decisions,” “parents argue over money and then slam doors shut,” “when people smile they look guilty,” and “you will become what you hate — it’s inevitable.” Nichtern will be reading from Your Emoticons Won’t Save You at a release party on January 19 at 237 Lafayette St. In addition, Ethan and his father, David Nichtern, a musician, composer, producer, Emmy winner, and senior Buddhist teacher, will be teaming up for the weekend workshop “The Art of Being Human” January 20-22 at the Shambhala Meditation Center of New York.