The Hand of Buddha
Short Stories
by Linda Watanabe McFerrin

"Everything changed the day the Buddha's hand arrived in the mail." The stories in The Hand of Buddha are about women of various ethnic backgrounds, from various regions of the U.S., who find themselves in situations that spin wildly out of control or silently disintegrate. Somehow McFerrin's characters maintain their sense of humor, if not their equilibrium.

A Buddha's hand is a citrus fruit from Asia, shaped like a pair of hands in prayer. McFerrin says, "A girlfriend sent this fruit to me when I was first trying to contend with my mother's Alzheimer's Disease." The title story charts how, by relying on the intervention and experience of friends, family, and neighbors, we transcend the inevitable to achieve compassion and grace.

Inspired by the author's own far-flung network of friends, many of McFerrin's female characters are unlucky in love, yet are always able to fathom the humor and pathos of romance. "Here is how you fall in love: you need a full moon and a snow-covered, high mountain wilderness. You need an ice-blue winter meadow dotted with run-down cabins, a boyfriend who calls you 'butter bean' for no apparent reason, and you need a stranger."

If McFerrin's 1998 Coffee House Press novel Namako Sea Cucumber is "the beautiful enactment of a child's virgin dance with the truth," (Los Angeles Times), then The Hand of Buddha leads us into more mature, sophisticated territory. The story "Rubber Time" portrays a woman, Tamara, who writes erotic short stories in exchange for payment from exclusive male clients - an author-for-hire who always writes for an audience of one. The captivating phone voice of one client turns out to be the editor of a men's magazine. The whole story is loaded with irony and double entrende, but is the joke on lovers or writers?