Avram Alpert combines personal experience and readings of modern novels to offer another way to understand modern Buddhism. He argues that it represents a rich resource not for attaining perfection but rather for finding meaning and purpose in a chaotic world. Avi Alpert's timely book makes a significant contribution to re-evaluating Buddhism's role in engaging with the struggles and complexities of the postcolonial world. The book is at once a personal chronicle of disenchantment and discovery and a literary history that charts global Buddhism and the aesthetics of human fragmentation and connectivity. Alpert's compelling readings of modern novels uncover a simple truth of Buddhist ethics at their core: we may be limited in our understanding of the universe, but we have the power to act kindly towards living beings. An ethics of social relationality emerges as the book's most profound insight, making its innovative readings indispensable for students and scholars of religion and literature.