THE CULT OF KASHAKNISHRA

About the Book

Kinetic State College will never again be the same since the advent of Professor Kashaknishra, whose daftly unorthodox spirituality takes that venerable institution’s broad educational mandate (“Something for Everybody”) into uncharted territory and wild controversy. Professor Doshy, art historian from Bombay, possessed of dazzling spiritual insight into his own discipline, looks on with some skepticism, as does Professor Brilliant of the Philosophy Department and a staunch defender of rationalism.

Added to this delightful stew are struggling musicologist Felix Carminum, lost somewhere in his dissertation-in-progress on 16th-century song, exotic librarian Thessaly Puma, who is baffled by our educational foibles, and other campus personages you will not soon forget. Who are Futzi and Putzi Twinkleberg, anyhow?

A Molotov cocktail is hurled and an unsolved murder mystery shakes the campus. Caught up in the midst of it all, Vice President Unterhosen undertakes a losing balancing act of defining his mission for the college. We are served up a madcap meditation on the meaning of life and on its higher education.

About the Author

. Though our author is portrayed above as he looked long before Kashaknishra’s advent into the world of Kinetic State College, the name Harry Kirschner is a pseudonym chosen to protect a gentle and pathologically private personage, safely hidden in the Boston area, from critical assault by all manner of bloodthirsty, cynical, and disbelieving wretches posing as educators of our youth. His own background in the East is necessarily murky, though substantial, and the experiences, reminiscences, and dreams preserved in his fiction are hardly as surrealistic or absurd as they may at first appear to an uninitiate. Step into the barmy spiritual world of this reclusive author of The Cult of Kashaknishra and enjoy his maniacal visions. Laugh, if you really must. But do not reveal the true identity of this scholar and musician to anyone, lest his magic be dissipated. Peace be with you.