Houseboat on the Ganges & A Room in Kathmandu: Letters from India & Nepal

"This wondrous book is more than a travelogue detailing Marilyn Stablein's years in India and Nepal: we also encounter the astonishing independence of a young woman at the forefront of the spiritual revolution of the 1960s. Stablein left her studies in Berkeley in 1966 as a teenager to live in the Far East for seven years, prior to the heft of the counter-culture's spiritual land rush to India at a time when most accounts were written by the occasional male pilgrim. Stablein's mother lovingly saved these letters, her daughter interweaving spiritual unfoldment, day-to-day cooking and boiling of water, and her pursuit of poetry and art—all with a wisdom that belies her youth. Through the intimacy of a young woman writing an elder, this remarkable book unleashes a compelling narrative, all the more relevant today, as we continue to grapple with gender equality. I am sure it will take its place among the best narratives of the time of spiritual pursuit in the East."

—George Kalamaras, author of The Theory and Function of Mangoes