Reviews

Fascinating and beautifully written.
— David Guy, New York Times Book Review

Stephen Mitchell's peculiar, audacious and very readable new book is at once a novelistic memoir, a metafiction, a spiritual guidebook, a post-Judeo-Christian Zen angelology, and a "comedy of the spirit" – but don't let that scare you off. The writing is as funny as it is learned, as exuberant and sexy as it is didactic.... This amusing, rich, and stunningly intelligent book is itself a spiritual experience. Just by grappling with Mitchell's ideas and following his stories you look up from the page to find you're further along on your own spiritual path, whichever one it is.
— Michelle Huneven, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

A beguiling spiritual memoir that masquerades as a comic novel... The more jaded reader may be shocked at the riches to be found here. Meetings with the Archangel is spirituality with an attitude, a wry, knowing, and playful entertainment with a theological subtext... [Its] spiritual insights, always revealed with urgency, intimacy, and candor, are sometimes startling... Profoundly moral and mystical.
— Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Charming, clear... and very funny.
— Richard Scheinin, San Jose Mercury-News

In this keen contemporary spiritual allegory... Mitchell balances playful cameos of great Western souls like Aquinas, Rilke, and Meister Eckhart with a witty, incisive portrayal of the workings of Zen training. He succeeds in creating a parable for thinking people with a hunger for reality.
— Publishers Weekly

An extravagantly creative and beautifully realized spiritual adventure story that honors imagination as a way of knowing. Stephen Mitchell has fashioned an immensely erudite and rich portrait of earthly and heavenly truth, beauty, passion, play, and enlightenment. This work of fiction is nothing short of awesome.
— Spirituality & Health

In one of the most strikingly original and engaging books of the year, Stephen Mitchell takes the reader on a spiritual journey–a trip through uncharted territories of the soul that are rarely explored so vividly in contemporary fiction. The most profound spiritual experiences are made comprehensible and accessible....Some of the richest passages in Meetings with the Archangel convey the absolute rapture that is experienced at the higher levels of spiritual practice. The heat and passion of these descriptions is more exciting than adventure-novel prose.
— Digby Diehl, The Player

Stephen Mitchell's work has often given me the strength to go on writing from the heart; he is one of the American voices I most admire today. His new book, Meetings with the Archangel, is an absolutely incredible piece of writing: extremely witty, profound, erotic, and deeply satisfying in many ways. The section about sex is unique and totally convincing: here he has succeeded in something that's almost impossible to do. I love the book's tone, which has all Mitchell's delicious humor and all the colloquial warmth of a novel or memoir. It deserves a wide and passionate audience.
— Erica Jong, author of Fear of Flying

A vivid and strange fiction, animated by an intense spiritual drive. Its accounts of Zen training surpass any I've seen, and help make this book a persuasive spiritual autobiography.
— Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon

I loved reading Meetings with the Archangel – found it fascinating, deep, enormously ambitious, and profoundly funny. It is a wonderful book.
— Elaine Pagels, author of The Gnostic Gospels

Insanely quirky, good-natured, unpretentious, and...genuinely enlightening.
— Kirkus Reviews

Meetings with the Archangel is a work of genius. Someone who doesn't have a clue about spiritual truth will enjoy it as a marvelously beautiful erotic adventure story, and someone who does have a clue will see that hidden in the midst of the poetic, erotic prose are the most marvelous Dharma truths, and she will be thrilled to read them.
— Sylvia Boorstein, author of It's Easier Than You Think

Stephen Mitchell's archangel is the only interesting angel I have ever read about. He keeps us enchanted and amused, and finally lets us in on the great secret about angels and human beings.
— Sam Keen, author of Fire in the Belly

Aptly subtitled, this is the touching fictional memoir of a Jewish man who chooses Zen as his spiritual path. After receiving a visit from the Archangel Gabriel, the man returns in memory to his graduate school days and retraces his spiritual wanderings, reevaluating his experiences from the perspective of a wiser and more philosophical self. Painful yet hopeful, these Meetings take us through the dark night of the soul experienced by mystics in every tradition. Mitchell also shows us angels in all their aspects, from the sweetly saccharine to the terrifyingly majestic, and he reveals the evolution of the angelic in human history, illuminating how that history reflects on the spiritual awareness of the humans who believe in angels. You need not, however, be a fan of angels to appreciate the book as an intelligent, insightful, compassionate look into the human soul and, thus, fascinating reading for all spiritual seekers.
—Booklist