KACHTICK, Keith

PERSONAL:

Born in TX. Education: Iowa Writer's Workshop. Religion: Buddhist.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. Agent—c/o Author Mail, HarperCollins, 10 East 53rd St., New York, NY 10022.

CAREER:

Writer. Lineage Project, New York, NY, senior instructor.

WRITINGS:

Hungry Ghost: A Novel, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to periodicals including Esquire, Texas Monthly, New York Times Magazine, and the Missouri Review.

SIDELIGHTS:

Keith Kachtick is a practicing Buddhist. He is a senior intructor at the Lineage Project, a nonprofit Dharma-based organization that runs meditation classes in youth prisons. Kachtick's writings have appeared in numerous periodicals and his first novel, Hungry Ghost, was published in 2003.

Hungry Ghost focuses on freelance photographer Carter Cox. Carter is thirty-nine-years old, a fledgling Buddhist, and full of bad habits, but longs to better his ways. He meets Mia Malone at a Buddhist retreat.

Mia is a twenty-six-year-old Catholic and determined to remain a virgin until she is married. Carter falls hard for Mia and convinces her to come on a photo shoot to Morocco with him. Although some reviewers felt that the second-person narrative of Hungry Ghost was hard to read, Joanne Wilkinson, a reviewer for Booklist, noted, "First-novelist Kachtick proves himself an inventive storyteller when he presents two versions of the trip to Morocco." In a review for the New York Times, Pico Iyer stated that Kachtick "writes with an assurance and verve that fling us without trepidation into the confusions of an earnest philanderer."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, April 1, 2003, Joanne Wilkinson, review of Hungry Ghost, p. 1378.

Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2003, review of Hungry Ghost, p. 419.

Library Journal, May 1, 2003, Christine Perkins, review of Hungry Ghost, p. 156.

New York Times, July 27, 2003, Pico Iyer, review of Hungry Ghost.

Publishers Weekly, April 28, 2003, review of Hungry Ghost, p. 48.*