Joel Schwartz
author / playwright
Published Books
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The Extraordinary Pupfish of Calaveras County (2008)
Composed of two interwoven coming-of-age stories, one told by a 15-year-old paperboy who finds himself a reluctant media hero and the other a 65-year-old window who charts herself coming alive again, The Extraordinary Pupfish is a rural California story involving the sale of an abandoned gold mine that threatens to pollute a town’s groundwater, and in which both narrators unwittingly become each other’s enemy.
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A Daoist Journey into China: journal of a voyage into the interior (2012)
The culmination of 50 years of Zen meditation set against a 10,000 mile unescorted trip to China in 1987, when tinkling bicycles in the streets—no cars, no high rises and everyone earning the same $20 wage—were the norms. On a meditational journey that took him to temples and monasteries, Schwartz seeks to describe the experience of meditation from the ‘inside.’