Product Description: In David G. Lanoue's fanciful, comic second novel, Laughing Buddha , anything can happen--and plenty does. The narrator from contemporary New Orleans journeys to the Old Japan of "geisha, samurai, and mad, moonstruck poets" on an undercover mission to solve a literary mystery: Why did the poet Buck-Teeth stop writing haiku after a certain lunar eclipse, and what could be done to help him recover his inspiration? Disguised as a Buddhist priest, bumbling through time and space while avoiding the ninja weapons of the evil critic Nakamura; our hero discovers that Buck-Teeth's writer's block is no mere academic problem but a grave matter with lives and poetry hanging in the balance...read more