As a child growing up in the Hollywood Hills during the 1950s, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson thought it was perfectly normal that a guru named Paul Brunton lived with his family and dictated everything about their daily rituals, from their diet to their travel plans to his parents' sex life. But in this extraordinary memoir, Masson reflects on just how bizarre everything about his childhood was?especially the relationship between his father and the elusive, eminent mystic he revered (and supported) for years.

Writing with candor and charm, Masson describes how his father became convinced that Paul Brunton?P.B. to his familiars?was a living God who would fill his life with enlightenment and wonder. As the Masson family's personal guru, Brunton freely discussed his life on other planets, laid down strict rules on fasting and meditation, and warned them all of the imminence of World War III. For years, young Jeffrey was as ardent a disciple as his father?but with the onset of adolescence, he staged a dramatic revolt against this domestic deity and everything he stood for.

Filled with absurdist humor and intimate confessions, My Father's Guru is the spellbinding coming-of-age story of one of our most brilliant writers.

Jenifer Levin is known for her novels Water Dancer (nominated for the PEN/Hemingway Award), Snow, Shimoni's Lover, The Sea of Light (nominated for the Lambda Literary Award in Fiction), and her short story collection Love and Death, & Other Disasters. Her essays and short fiction are widely anthologized. She has also contributed feature articles to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Rolling Stone, among others. One of the first openly gay authors to be published in the mainstream press, the Washington Post named her part of the "lesbian literati".

Levin graduated from the University of Michigan with a BA in Comparative Literature, subsequently studying Medical Anthropology and South Asian history. She traveled widely in Europe and Southeast Asia, lived and worked in Israel, and studied Tibetan Buddhism for 10 years. A former competitive swimmer, she has coached women's running and weight-training and completed several marathons.

Levin has two sons whom she adopted as toddlers from Cambodia. Her essays about Cambodia—a country devastated by war, poverty, and genocide—before and after the intervention of the United Nations, and her experiences adopting and raising special needs children, have appeared in several anthologies.

She and her family live in New York City.

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, When Elephants Weep and Dogs Never Lie About Love. Raised to be a spiritual leader his search for life's truths has seen him teach Sanskrit at the University of Toronto and a Freudian analyst. His denouncement of Freud, The Assault on Truth, remains controversial to this day.

After leaving academia Masson moved to New Zealand where he lives with his family.

Untreed Reads is publishing most of Masson's previously-published print titles in ebook format throughout 2012 and 2013.